In my interstitial time (thanks for the nomenclature, D’Arcy) I’ve been trying to follow as much of the current Wikipedia controversy as I can. It’s quite a flap. The issues are urgent, but the treatment of them is predictable. Even the truly disturbing aspects of the case are so coated in journalistic sensationalism that it’s hard to see the core truths being debated. After reading the UPI account of Wikipedia’s “at least 1,000 articles” (it’s more like 800,000 and counting) I’m reminded that reasoned authority, never in great supply, is a rara avis indeed these days, even (especially?) in the so-called mainstream media. Unfortunately, no one who knows better can reach into that UPI account and correct it. No, it’s not a libelous falsehood about a public figure, but if it were there’d be no correcting it except by the authority who let the mistake get in there in the first place.

I don’t by any means want to minimize the potential for harm in an online resource like Wikipedia. I don’t want to maximize it either, though the current media coverage I’m seeing online doesn’t encourage much careful reflection. (Can’t say I expected it to.) I’ll simply note that Wikipedia is in many respects, as Alan Levine notes, a mirror. Or perhaps it’s a time-lapse photograph of civilization itself. That sounds grand, even grandiose, but had I world enough and time I’d at least make the argument.

Until that day, it’s interesting to consider that the antiWikipedia movement includes both those who believe it’s dangerously anarchic and those who believe it’s one vast elitist conspiracy.

In a word, Wikipedia is the latest effort in the new leftist attempt to consolidate representative knowledge for the masses. It represents the migration of the old left into the field of cyber-information. Now programmers get to play at cyber-revolutions…

In a word, amazing.

Now, more than ever, we need clear thinking, rigorous reasoning, about authority: its nature, purpose, and relation to justice and democracy. Teachers are of course vital researchers in this area, or should be. We conserve authority. We interrogate authority. We create authority. And we urge and encourage those capacities in our classrooms every time we convene a class.

I think we must have faith in reason to make any headway in this endeavor. Turtles all the way down just won’t work, even as a pragmatic approach. But of course that’s only one point of view. Reasoned, but probably not neutral.

EDIT: I’ve blogged several times about Wikipedia. Two particular entries may be of interest in this current controversy. One is on Wikipedia’s plan to “freeze” certain articles once their content has become stable and uncontroversial. Another is a more philosophical jotting on what assumptions underlie all of our conceptualizations of the nature and meaning of the quest for knowledge, with Wikipedia as merely one example.