La verità secondo Wikipedia

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW PRENDE di petto un tema che striscia da tempo nella mente di molti: Wikipedia, quello che ci viene scritto, la gente che la legge e il resto dei mezzi di comunicazione. Iniziamo da questo.

Money quote: Wikipedia's standards of inclusion--what's in and what's not--affect the work of journalists, who routinely read Wikipedia articles and then repeat the wikiclaims as "background" without bothering to cite them. These standards affect students, whose research on many topics starts (and often ends) with Wikipedia. And since I used Wikipedia to research large parts of this article, these standards are affecting you, dear reader, at this very moment.

Ok, e quali sono questi standards of inclusion? Cioè, come fanno gli utenti-scrittori di Wikipedia a decidere cos'è vero e cosa non lo è? Ci sono tre leggi che regolano la pubblicazione dei materiali: niente ricerche personali su un soggetto, punto di vista neutrale e la terza...

Money quote: Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observa­bility. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards--standards that aren't especially surprising given that the site is rooted in a Web-based community, but that should concern those of us who are interested in traditional notions of truth and accuracy. On Wikipedia, objective truth isn't all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication--ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth," states Wikipedia's official policy on the subject.

In passato le polemiche e le critiche a Wikipedia, soprattutto per quanto riguarda la presunta incapacità dei suoi volontari estensori di raggiungere l'eccellenza che viene insieme all'idea di enciclopedia, hanno devastato le risorse e l'attenzione di un buon numero di persone, incluso il sottoscritto. Ma il tema della verità, disarticolato dal resto della carcassa delle discussioni, emerge con una certa rilevanza. Quali sono le conclusioni?

Money Quote: So what is Truth? According to Wikipedia's entry on the subject, "the term has no single definition about which the majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree." But in practice, Wikipedia's standard for inclusion has become its de facto standard for truth, and since Wikipedia is the most widely read online reference on the planet, it's the standard of truth that most people are implicitly using when they type a search term into Google or Yahoo.

On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject. That standard is simple: something is true if it was published in a newspaper article, a magazine or journal, or a book published by a university press--or if it appeared on Dr. Who.

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