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    Wikipedia Knows Nothing
    Wikipedia Knows Nothing
    Wikipedia Knows Nothing
    Ebook123 pages1 hour

    Wikipedia Knows Nothing

    By Chris Bateman

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    About this ebook

    What does the Wikipedia know, and how can it know it? More to the point, how can anyone using an anonymously edited source, the contents of which change on a daily basis, know that what they are reading constitutes knowledge? In this provocative challenge to contemporary concepts of objectivity, four figures of knowledge – the Wikipedia, scientific experiments, anonymous peer review, and school education – are investigated in order to question the way we understand the world around us.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu.com
    Release dateSep 6, 2016
    ISBN9781365380525
    Wikipedia Knows Nothing

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      Book preview

      Wikipedia Knows Nothing - Chris Bateman

      Zylinska

      Preface

      Preface

      Despite the title, this book isn’t intended as an attack on the Wikipedia. In fact, I have been (and perhaps still am) an editor of the Wikipedia, and turn to it often as a convenient reference for topics where consensus is a foregone conclusion, since it is an outstanding aggregator of trivia. What I am arguing in this book, however, is the Wikipedia cannot be a source of knowledge, in part because of the uncertainties that necessarily accompany using it as a source. Yet the deeper claim I am developing here isn’t directed at the Wikipedia, since my argument extends to all encyclopaedias that have ever been written, and perhaps that ever could be written, since aggregation of facts is radically disconnected from knowledge as it ought to be understood.

      The contents of this book do attack something, however, something that I am trying to reform, expose, or even perhaps entirely destroy: anonymous peer review. I write papers for conferences and journals that go through this arcane ritual, and I review papers for conferences and journals and must thus accord with its strange and hierophantic oddities. I consider the entire process to be thoroughly immoral, for reasons that shall become clear in due course, and always append a note to my own reports stating my willingness to be identified to the authors whose work I am reviewing. Masks, despite the mythology of superheroes, do not bring out the best in people. Furthermore, the practice of concealing the identities of everyone involved in an assessment of written work is utterly and inescapably counter-productive, having more-or-less the opposite effect of what is intended. The confused picture of knowledge which makes anonymous peer review seem reasonable – even ethically desirable – is something that I hope that my arguments here manage to bring into question.

      Nonetheless, my purpose in writing this book was not to launch an attack on anonymous peer review: that battle has already begun; I am merely joining the growing movement that recognises what a horrendous misstep there has been within the academy in the unthinking acceptance of the rhetoric of secrecy as a road to truth. Rather, I wrote this book, and the blog posts that comprise its earliest draft, because I wanted to sort out, in my own head, the tremendous confusion about knowledge, reality, and expertise that has dominated thinking within my lifetime. My hope, of course, is that other people will read what I have written and see that, as Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre are fond of saying, another world is possible, a slogan associated with opposition to capitalism, but which can inspire us without us having to identify a specific ‘enemy’. My further hope is that this book will be part of an ongoing conversation, an example of the virtuous discourse I have committed to furthering.

      A key claim I develop in this book – that the connection between anonymity and truth is one that ought to be challenged – took an interesting turn shortly after I finished the draft manuscript and announced it to the world. Nine days after this, a Wikipedia Czar called a tribunal, and within a week the page about me had been deleted. While this could be a coincidence, after a decade of no interest at all in my page it certainly seems like a retaliatory gesture – and one, I might add, that would violate the values and policies of the Wikipedia if that were its motivation. In a brutal irony, it is this kind of abuse that Wikipedia Knows Nothing warns about, while maintaining the inherent value and potential of wikis as tools. It might well be that I am indeed no longer ‘Notable’, since Wikipedia has undergone considerable notability-inflation in the ten years since I was first declared ‘Notable’ in 2006. But the implication of what happened to my page, and indeed to many others that have been summarily deleted over the years, is rather far from the egalitarian claims that the Wikipedia is something ‘anyone can edit’.

      The book is organised around four questions, all of which are concerned with what philosopher’s call epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. I wanted to mention this here, in the preface, as I shall be trying to avoid words like ‘epistemology’ in the book’s chapters, since I hope to write a book that can be read by anyone, and not just academics. I shall probably fail. But I remain inspired by Mary Midgley’s remarkable talent to combine erudition and accessibility in her books, and strive towards this ideal in all my philosophy – for all that the temptation to use some esoteric term (like ‘hierophantic’) all too often leads me astray. Philosophy is a service just like plumbing, and it ought to be there for whomever needs it. Indeed, Midgley frequently compares philosophy to ‘conceptual plumbing’. I prefer to call it ‘nerds with words’.

      While I’m airing my philosophical laundry, a short note about my use of the phrase ‘fundamentally immoral’. This may appear to be an appeal to rational foundations of morality that no-one could reject, in the manner of Enlightenment philosophers such as Kant. My position on moral philosophy, as developed in Chaos Ethics, does not rely upon this kind of foundational argument: I always assume different moral practices will be in play in any contentious situation. My assertion that anonymous reviewers are pursuing a fundamentally immoral practice is thus based upon the simpler claim that any moral argument that could be used to defend double-blind peer review will be vulnerable either to the epistemic argument I develop throughout this book that a commitment to the truth should mandate transparent, co-operative review practices, or to Kant’s argument for transparency, presented in the third chapter. ‘Fundamentally immoral’ thus means solely that there is no viable moral argument for the anonymity of reviewers that doesn’t entail fatal inconsistencies.

      To my infinite surprise, I found I have chosen endnotes – and this decision has occurred despite my agreement with my aesthetician colleague Nils Stear that trying to read endnotes is like eating French fries thirty feet from the ketchup bowl. The problem he alludes to is one I am equally frustrated with, which is when a subsidiary thought is buried in an endnote, forcing the reader to approach an otherwise linear essay as if it were a Fighting Fantasy gamebook (If you read the pithy aside, turn to page 23…). Nonetheless, I chose endnotes because I wanted the prose to read as cleanly as possible and I have long since eliminated in myself the desire to append such subsidiary thoughts: if I cannot get the important ideas into my writing, I have not written as well as I should like. So yes, I have used endnotes, but you should never feel obligated to span the thirty feet to the ketchup bowl since every endnote in this book is only ever a citation for further reading. No quips, remarks, observations, or insights lie in the notes section – you only need to go there if you want to see who I am leaning upon.

      My thanks are due to a great many people for their contributions to the discussions that led me here, and for their assistance on the road to publication. First and foremost, to my wife for continuing to support my ‘philosophy habit’, and for helping me create the space in our rather crowded family life for writing. Thanks are also due to José Zagal for hooking me up with Drew Davidson, the editor who has generously taken my thoughts and turned them into a paper-and-print book – and a bits-and-bytes e-book, my first publication with a Creative Commons license. I must offer yet further thanks to Mary Midgley for her continued support – and criticism! – of my work, and to Allen Wood for the same. I am lucky to have such wonderful minds as correspondents.

      Then there are those who I have not met or spoken to, but who have massively affected the course of my arguments and investigations. I only recently discovered Jacques Rancière’s work, but you will find his fingerprints all over the final chapter of this book. I do not know that I would have had the strength to attempt this without his becoming, for a while at least, my muse. I also offer my grateful thanks to someone who sadly passed away while I was finishing writing this manuscript: Hilary Putnam. He spent much of his career arguing against the picture that this book challenges, and we can all find inspiration in his endless willingness to challenge and revise his own point of view as much as anyone else’s.

      Enormous gratitude is also owed to those wonderful digital travellers who alight from time to time at my blog and share thoughts upon the ideas that have eventually been crafted into this text. A few names are obfuscated by nicknames, but none

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