Is the distance between fact and factoid shrinking? Monica
Hesse, of The Washington Post, looks to some first-person
sources in her search for the truth.
How many legs does a dog have, if you call the tail a leg?
Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. - Abraham
Lincoln
(Note: Lincoln never said this. He liked a similar, more
long-winded anecdote about a cow, but the dog version?
Nope.
Still, the quote is credited to the former US president on
about 11,000 web pages, including quote resources Brainy
Quote and World of Quotes.
Though not technically "true", the quote makes a nice
start to this article about truth, being topical and brief,
so if we want to go with truth-by-consensus (very popular
now), we can go ahead and just say that he said it.
Besides, by the time you finish this article, your brain
might have tricked you into thinking that he did say it (more
on that later), so let's just go ahead and leave it in. All
right?)
Moving on.
Inhabitants of the Wiki-world, consider these random but
related events, most of which pertain to the under-25 set,
all of which occurred in the past six months:
•The launching of Cumul.us, a Wiki-weather site in which
users can collaboratively decide whether it is raining
outside.
•The release of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact
Society, Farhad Manjoo's exploration of the "cultural
ascendancy of belief over fact".
•The addition of "collateral misinformation" to
UrbanDictionary.com. The entry: "When someone alters a
Wikipedia article to win a specific argument, anyone who
reads the false article before the `error' is corrected
suffers from collateral misinformation."
•A scholar from the Hoover Institution performed an
experiment with totally unsurprising results: When 100 terms
from US history books were entered into Google, the topics'
Wikipedia articles were the first hits 87 times.
All of these examples are signs of the times.
And all of them get at a big question: For the Google
generation, what happens to the concepts of truth and
knowledge in a user-generated world of information
saturation?
"We're losing him! We're going to lose him!" Chad Stark
frantically clicks back and forth between two windows on his
computer screen.
Mr Stark is the sweater vest-wearing, 30-something, librarian
currently manning AskUsNow, a 24/7 online chat open to
Maryland residents in the US who need research help.
A few minutes ago, his computer, located in the grubby
employee workroom, had gone ping.
A question, from an anonymous user: "How big do iguanas
get?"AskUsNow, developed four years ago, helps patrons find
accurate online information so they don't have to fumble
blindly in Google.
Librarians: reliably on the front lines of truth protection.
Mr Stark types that he'd be happy to help, but he's not fast
enough for the user:"dude u r boring me."
Mr Stark scrolls quickly through several sites, searching for
reputable iguana info.
"u respond slow. please consider taking a typing class."
More pings. Questions that will be answered by other
librarians logged on to the system flash up on the screen:
"What did people learn from the physical effects of atomic
bombings?""How do activities of insurance companies
facilitate production?"
Suddenly, iguana guy feels remorseful for his earlier taunts.
"i'm sorry. i'm drunk."
Mr Stark sends a link, but it's too late. Iguana guy seems to
have left his computer.
"What they want is for you to give them the very first answer
that pops up. And we can do that, but if it's wrong ..."
"If it's wrong" is the big "If", the question that plagues
librarians and teachers today.
Of course, the information might be right - in one study,
published in Nature, Wikipedia was found to be only slightly
less reliable than Encyclopedia Britannica (four errors to
Britannica's every three).
There's at least a decent chance that the wisdom of the
crowds is fine wisdom indeed.
What concerns people like Mr Stark is the fact that, without
peer review, it's so easy to be wrong, and for your wrongness
to become the top Google hit on a subject, and for your
wrongness to be repeated by other people who think it's
right, until everyone decides that it's raining in Phoenix.
Andrew Keen describes it as "the cult of the amateur" in his
book of the same name. Stephen Colbert called it "wikiality"
meaning, "a reality where, if enough people agree with a
notion, it must be true."
Information specialists call it the death of information
literacy.
Information is about tidbits, crumbs of data.
Information can be carried around on a Trivial Pursuit card.
Information says, "It's currently 95 degrees in Anchorage."
Knowledge is different. Knowledge is about context - about
knowing what to do with accumulated information.
Knowledge is saying: "Dude, based on what I know of Alaska,
it's never 95 degrees in Anchorage".
