1 post tagged “argument”

It happened again yesterday: on some blog in the programming corner of the world, someone cited Wikipedia in the comments and the next response was a pissy "Don't think you've proven anything by citing Wikipedia." Worse, the original commenter apologized for his gaffe. I am not blind to the faults of the great encyclopedia in the sky, but the current agreement on the uselessness of Wikipedia amongst anyone who knows anything on the Internet gives me a great ache in the balls. It's now acceptable to simply respond as above. At least the original complaints came with links to examples of mistakes or counter-citations. The next generation of complaints came with links to articles and sites that aggregated the examples of mistakes. Now simply stating your opponent dared cite the site is enough to carry a counter-suit.

For the chattering class in question, the Internet is a place to argue. A most wonderful place, because you're never wrong (at worst you just find a different place to ride your same broken hobbyhorse). Rather than an actual deeply spiritual disturbance, most complaints about Wikipedia arise when it is used as proof of the other side of an argument. It is a high crime on the Internet to ever admit you're wrong; better to keep your tail high and piss right back on the other guy's lamppost. Fine. Hit me with a citation from a different authority then. Something. Anything. I'll hump it on over to the library if you've got a volume and page from Britannica for me.

I do not consider Wikipedia an unquestionable authority. If I promise never to commit that logical fallacy, everyone on the other side should stop with theirs. Because I do think there are a number of errors on the other side of the argument (one more if throwing the baby out with the bathwater qualifies as a fallacy). The economist in me always wants to simplify things: let's say Wikipedia is wrong 20% of the time. Heck, say 50% (ignoring the fact it would never have gotten to where it is if this were so). For the sake of this argument, all of the errors made are confined to the 50%. The other 50% are immaculate. What this means, oh great programming minds who haunt useful programming blogs with your useless chatter, is Wikipedia knows more about (0.5 * total number of pages) subjects than you do. So if there's an error on the page about Closures or Lexical Parsers or whatever, we can find a page under . . . let's go  Ad hominem and say . . . sex it can teach you something about. The problem, ass-face (I feel we know each other well enough that I can call you that), is you think of everything in Internet terms, me vs. you. The "fact" on Wikipedia isn't you vs. the author, mano a mano, it's you vs. the author and (on any reasonably meaningful topic, leaving political ones to one side) all the other folks who reviewed the page and didn't change his "fact". And the author of the original paper the Wikipedia contributor plagiarized. Ergo, it's ok for me to continue to use Wikipedia to guide myself through the Thursday, Friday and Saturday Times crosswords.

There's a larger issue here about the nature of facts and knowledge, what those words mean, but I am stale and small and terribly out-of-practice writing. Furthermore, it's probably well above me. Weighing the benefit of Wikipedia vs. the risk of the incorrect being accepted as fact, my personal justice scales tip toward the former, because I think the risk is offset (ever so slightly) by the (potential) review process.