I hate people who hate Wikipedia... and presumption

So I just read this piece on one of my favourite blogs and I have to say it rings extremely true to me (not just because it's based out of Philly, though its being on the Penn webspace ought to inspire rivyalry right?). I am always frustrated when I encounter facilely derogatory comments about this wonderful compendium of knowledge.

Basically the (admittedly brief) comment in the original article that this blogpost responds to chastises wiki for having a longer article on Klingon than on Latin. I suppose this is a slightly more subtle complaint about the site than that it's factually unreliable (also a bad argument) but I think it fails nevertheless.

If one subscribes to the view that wikipedia benefits from the wisdom of the crowd, then perhaps Klingon simply warrants a longer entry. To dispute this is to court elitism which, while not always bad, I think should be seen as presumptively so. Anti-elitism is a good use of presumption, by my lights. Wikipedia is a thoroughly anti-elitist enterprise and most of its user revel in this fact (setting aside the issue of whether wiki is worse on elitist topics than serious encyclopedias, it is infinitely better on matters that fall below this level of scrutiny, i.e. the vast majority of things that people are interested in).

Perhaps the argument is derivative on the idea (contrary to the suggestion in the previous paragraph) that wikipedia is less of a democracy and more of an oligarchy? I guess the argument here would be something like: Sure, I'd concede that Klingon matters more (in some sense) than Latin if article length really communicated the preferences of the public at large, but it doesn't. In fact, article length communicates the editorial preferences of the individuals who manage the site (the oligarchs in the analogy above) and these individuals are unrepentant nerds who lack the requisite intellectual perspective to properly police their project's scope.

Assuming one only cares about elitist topics, i.e. those that fall by the wayside under the rubric of crowd wisdom, then why is it problematic that there exists an unduly long article on a topic of no relevance to one's elitist interests? Perhaps the thought is that if wikipedia doesn't have its priorities straight (where priorities here are demonstrated by making article length proportional to importance, of some kind) then we can use this fact as reason to presumptively discredit the entire enterprise. Thus there's no need to read the wiki on Latin: we can safely conclude from the existence of a longer article on Klingon that it's not worthy of our time. This strikes me as a terrible presumption. Why would the quality of one article have any impact upon the quality of another? Let alone why would the mere existence of one article have any impact on the quality of any other?

Don't get me wrong, I frequently lament that the individuals in the world most technically capable of disseminating information often lack the taste to critically assess which information to privilege (.avis of BBC documentaries) and which not to (anime .avis). But this is a (silly) lament about the existence of people who I feel have inferior taste and a (less silly) plea for better content on the interweb. But the existence of anime pushers doesn't inhibit my access to BBC documentaries; the absence of documentary pushers does that independently. Therefore, the only reason we have to suspect that wikipedia's Latin article is inferior is the belief that there are no intellectuals/academics writing anything for it. And this just isn't true.

I'm not arguing for the eclipse of all other encyclopedias or even that wiki be considered a serious source for academic papers (though I tend to think it should have some place in the academic world, as long as it is regulated by professors). I'm not arguing against any traditionally reliable source of knowledge at all. I'm merely arguing that wikipedia not only filled and continues to fill a massive hole in the encyclopedic landscape as it stands and that to view its diversity (in any sense of the word) as a weakness is to court the worst kind of elitism.

Update: Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty funny

Unoriginal Blog Names

I will soon write a post on why I think the scriptural notion that there's nothing new under the sun is mistaken (in a non-trivial way, honest) but for now that thesis has suffered a startling setback. Apparently there's another blog out there with the same title as this nascent one--though it seems that it (like 9 out of 10 blogs) has failed in its first year. Now, I didn't deliberate for an extended period of time on the title but I figured it was original enough to stand a chance at getting a unique url. Not so. Still, despite this ironic turn of events, I think my thesis can be salvaged, but that's for another time. Maybe I should have gone for UnProfessional Dilettante (...peel the onion). Is it too late to stop now?

I'd just like to lament the fact that I've had to abandon at least three hyperlink ideas in the above paragraph because youtube has let me down.