Is ignorance a contagious disease?
Robert McHenry is a former editor of Encyclopedia Britannica. His article The
Faith Based Encyclopeida is an often referred to critique of the Wikipedia.
Toward the end of the article he refers to what might be called the restroom metaphor:
The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.
It has the right ring to it, though perhaps the proper response should be something
along the lines of "we're always taking chances in whatever we do, so what's
so different here?". McHenry seems to be suggesting that one small germ of
inaccuracy can spread until the entire sea of knowledge is contaminated, and when
that sea of knowledge is contaminated, our ships (to boldly switch metaphors in
the middle of a sentence) are in danger of sinking. It seems to me that the faith
that McHenry refers to has to be examined from an addition angle. We seem to find
security in the fact that somebody, somewhere on an encyclopedia page has noted
the facts as they truly are. We don't necessarily have to know or read those facts,
but our faith in the world as an ordered and knowable world is reinforced by that
assumption.
Go to: As far as resources go ..., or
Go to: Don't Bogart that Info