I decided to respond to Larry Sanger’s response:
How can both I reject epistemic collectivism and yet say that Wikipedia is a great project, which I do? Well, the problem is that epistemic collectivists like Wikipedia but for the wrong reasons. What’s great about it is not that it produces an averaged view, an averaged view that is somehow better than an authoritative statement by people who actually know the subject. That’s just not it at all. What’s great about Wikipedia is the fact that it is a way to organize enormous amounts of labor for a single intellectual purpose.
— Larry Sanger
Because, quite simply, I like it best. I agree with his reaction to Lanier, which is mixed agreement and disagreement. The fact that wikipedia homogenizes authorship and tries to facilitate an atrificial “meta source” at the expense of contextualization and quality is almost excuseable to me because part of me still delightedly geeks out about how cool it is that so many people know so much stuff! The fact that Wikipedia is, as Sanger puts it, “for a single intellectual purpose” makes it excuseable because anything which reaffirms that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who are knowledgeable about things that I am not makes me happy.
Obviously, the fact that the majority of aggregators on wikipedia aren’t actually experts and that the unmediated will of the majority is not actually a sound war cry to listen to is outside of the realm of what I want to believe is true, so I shall here decide to ignore it and fulfill the rest of this post as though just my own opinion (and the opinion of Larry Sanger) is factual, just like a wiki would.
If I were to not mention the above information, I would also definitely not include that fact that Lanier’s comments in the interview about the mob mentality factor associated with highly centralized information totally disturbed me.
So actually, Sanger is more right for his statement that it isn’t a good thing at all that wikipedia can make an “averaged view,” at least it is definitely not one of the best parts of wikipedia. Both Larry and I agree that in the name of academic pursuit and intellectual elitism, we can’t fully dislike epistemic collectivism like Lanier. We just can’t muster up the common sense.
Possibly Relevant Posts:
- The Pot Calling the Kettle Reductive (1) | Lily Q
- Responding to a Response is Almost as Meta as Aggregating an Aggregator (0) | Jessica
- Past As Prelude, Kind Of (0) | Angela
