Tuesday Research: Wikipedia

[brennayovanoff]

In her post, Tessa makes great points about cultural truth and the philosophy of information, and as she mentions, Stephen Colbert has raised legitimate and hysterically funny concerns about the truthiness of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit (as well as introducing the term Wikiality into the public vocabulary). His position on elephants

Comments

[tessagratton]

I like that differentiation! Pop culture is particularly suited to a user-created-information-station, seeing as how pop culture is also user-created.

[brennayovanoff]

seeing as how pop culture is also user-created.

I hadn't even thought of that, but it's so dead-on. It's like, there's the creation of the thing, and then audience participation extends beyond the initial experience, and people actually become caretakers of it.

I have no idea what it means, but I'm sure that it means something, so I'll keep thinking about it until I develop a theory (I love theories).

[fairgoldberry]

I'm kind of the same way. If I'm thinking, "Who shot McKinley again?" and I know that the answer is either on page...something...of the book about Theodore Roosevelt I've got in another room, or ten keystrokes away on wikipedia, I'll go the wiki route. But for anything other than a basic reference fact ("What's black cohosh good for?") I have reference books and smart friends.

[brennayovanoff]

Yes! There's all this factual information that's pretty basic, and can be either accurate or not (excluding conspiracy theories and the like), but I don't have room to keep all of it at the front of my brain. So I like having someone else store for me, in a clear, cross-referenced form.