Every time I gird my loins and venture across campus to Vernon Street I am forcibly reminded within one boozy hour of the myriad reasons I don't go to the frats on a regular basis. Somehow in my old age (Wait; scratch that. I developed this stance after my third or so week at Trinity) I've become a social vegetarian--now even the sight of the Vernon Street meat market sends my stomach into nauseous backflips. The same blank faces, the same porky shoulders, the same trembling ribs as every weekend at the shop and I'm thinking I'd like to go out to the plot in the back and grow (or shoot!) my own. It doesn't matter how much cheap beer I've been urged to swill, or at how many bass-thumps-per-minute the music's chunking along--the Vernon social scene perpetually disamuses me. This is why I am well slept: last night I saw me walking home by 1 a.m., pondering college life and, by the time I reached Summit, pretty solidly deciding I'll stay in my cozy room and take my chances being seen as a perverse and insular social anomaly if it means I'll be exempt from false interactions, strappy tanks and Natty Ice. There goes that notion of Vernon providing an ideal social scene...
On to another falsely ideal system!
Jason's articles were interesting and, shockingly, I actually did read through the transcript of the 45-minute-speech Colin indicated we might understandably skip. I respect what I think Jason's saying in regards to the evils of Wikipedia (that it's a really subjective tool that we ugly humans have run away with and shat upon and manipulated in our standardly devious little mammalian ways, giggling demonically and cackling "look what I can do!" over and over as we twist and tie and tear apart); what I find perhaps even more interesting than his points, though, is that he doesn't directly state what he opines to be wrong with Wikipedia. He never explicitly says, "This, this, and this is a problem," but instead is implicitly suggestive, backstroking around what he sees as primary issues with really entertaining metaphors and the terse, sardonic one-liners that kept me reading after I might have stopped (my favorite being the wry "wow, what a great thing is man") that smack of a healthy dosage of Dane Cookism rather than goold ol' exposition.
So Wikipedia was basically founded on a high, hippie-dippie, let's hold hands and sing and believe in the basic good of man notion? Surprising. Jason says of Wikipedia's founder: "Jimbo Wales is a Randian Objectivist. This means that in his particular interpretation of that philosophical thought, he does not like to interfere, he likes to give general ideas, he likes to trust in people, and he likes that the truth, that the truth represents an honest objective entity that cannot be questioned. A is A. That is to say, if somebody says "this is blue", no amount of your stupid liberal whining is going to make it not blue. That's the theory behind that aspect of Randian Objectivism." In theory, this is really quite lovely, but the truth is never "the truth," and even when "the truth" has been processed through a number of lenses it's still less truth-y than it could be (which Jason does sort of address). Seems to me that in his Randian Objectivism Jim Walkes accidentally started off a great space for a cyber information disseminationg commune that believes in shifting viewpoints all holding valid information and truthiness. How postmodern.
I'm particularly fond of the portion of Jason's speech in which he talks about Carmine DeSapio, Jason offering a little criticism of the dangers of promoting half-truths: "Now, who gives a shit? It's Carmine DeSapio, he's the last guy of Tammany Hall, I get it, we're done. And that's the problem, is you have to say: Well, which one are you going to do? Are you going to self-aggrandize, or are you going to criticise? And I'm going to go with criticising because again, when you say sum of human knowledge..."
I really like (and subscribe to) the idea that if it's not the the truth, it's not the truth, and there IS no median and no acceptable venue for bullshit. Personal truths can be taken only so far--there has to be one whole, agreed upon truth at the end of the day, and it will probably be an amalgamation of many versions of what the truth is. What I think I hear Jason saying, though not explicitly, is that if you're promoting something as a fact, make goddamn sure it's a fact. Approximations, no matter how near, have absolutely no business being labelled as truths--thus, the danger of Wikipedia and the outrageously high likelihood of misinformation.
Perhaps I didn't read enough, so somebody set me straight if this is the case--but I couldn't identify any place where Jason provides and remedies. I'd be really curious to hear from him the direction in which he'd like Wikipedia to move--you know--maybe propose some alternatives. How would Jason fix what he's criticizing? How would he make Wikipedia a more reliable source? Anybody have the answer? Is this written somewhere, or shall I scour more?
All in all, I don't hear Jason advocating for a 20th century equivalent of heretical bookburning, but instead for some regulation to verify truth for truth and skim the bullshit off the top of the information stew.
Also, I would have really, really liked it if Wikipedia HAD been called "Jimbo's Big Bag o' Trivia." If such were the case, damn, would I ever have some ideas as to how to remedy the site's "boring color scheme and layout." Somehow, and I have no idea why, said ideas all involve pigs in bandanas and red and white checkerboard patterns with roosters scrambling along the borders set to a backdrop of "Turkey in the Straw" and barnyard noise audio features... Now if that isn't worthy of respect...
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