As the academic year shudders to a close, as teachers and examiners everywhere emerge battered and bug-eyed from beneath slagheaps of assessment papers, I'm struck once again by how a dowdy education system hides its flaws inside larded layers of snobbery and obscurantism.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
Many aspects of our education system could use an upgrade. But, of all the absurd academic protocols we teach our children, the first, snottiest, most widespread, most rigid and most hypocritical is this: despise Wikipedia.
Or at least, pretend to. We all use Wikipedia. It's hard to avoid. On just about any Google search, Wiki tops the list. Because it's also astoundingly comprehensive, intelligible and reliable, it has become a ubiquitous go-to start point. Yet almost the first research rule our kids learn is Wiki-denial. Read it if you must but, never, honey, never ever admit to it.
Wikipedia is almost 15. Last month, at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, King Willem-Alexander awarded it the 2015 Erasmus Prize for disseminating and democratising knowledge across the globe. So, were we wrong about Wiki? Or has it changed?
Both, probably. A standout moment in my own academic year was setting a Wiki-article as a writing exercise for my (post-grad) students. They expected it – when they'd picked themselves up off the floor – to be easy. In fact the entire rubric (neutral stance, insistent referencing, global access and radically open editing) proved surprisingly exacting.
If printed, The Economist estimates, Wikipedia would fill 1000 hefty volumes. It would also be instantly out-of-date. Online, it's amended several times a second. With almost 18 billion page views and half a billion unique visitors a month, it is the world's seventh most visited site, after YouTube, Facebook and the various search engines.
It has almost 27 million registered editors, more than 126,000 active editors and, in English alone, about 3400 "very active" editors (now climbing again after a long decline) who each make more than 100 edits a month. So yes, it's big. But as an exercise in the leaderless, collaborative and largely anonymous pursuit of scholarly excellence, Wikipedia also possesses an astonishing beauty.
Almost every facet of Wikipedia is remarkable, from its accidental history to its constant self-scrutiny to its status as ongoing social experiment. But most amazing is a single undeniable fact. The main source of our doubt and disdain – the sheer audacity of providing authorial expertise using neither authors nor experts – has proved its overwhelming strength.
Wikipedia has five "pillars" – it must be encyclopedic, free and open, neutral, respectful and without firm rules. Instead of rules, it has wiki-pages of detailed policies and guidelines, dispute resolution mechanisms and behavioural etiquettes – all of them as transparently editable and crowd-sourced as any other Wiki entry.
But most interesting to me is the ban on primary research. The demand that every input be traced to a published and authoritative source doesn't make it true, necessarily, but does enable genuine crowd-sourcing of scholarship. This is a revelation, and a revolution. So yes, Wikipedia is flawed. Above all, it needs more female input. But the obvious response, for you-and-me users who encounter something stupid or biased or just plain wrong, is to hop in there and fix it. I'll see you there, yes? Oh, and honey? Cite away!
