There’s a fascinating history of Noah Webster’s iconographic American dictionary in the Nov. 6, 2006 edition of The New Yorker (”Noah’s Mark,” by Jill Lepore). When Webster first proposed a “Dictionary of the American Language” in 1800, he was roundly criticized for planning to include new words spoken by common people. The logic behind the attacks, writes Lepore, “went something like this: Because any words new to the United States are either stupid or foreign, there is no such thing as the ‘American language’; there’s just bad English.”
Much later, Webster’s was still criticized for its egalitarian tendencies: “In this magazine [The New Yorker], Dwight Macdonald complained that Webster’s Third had debased the language ‘in the name of democracy.’ The dictionary’s editorial staff had called for a show of hands to make decisions about words and usage. Macdonald challenged both the method and its premise: ‘If nine-tenths of the citizens of the United States…were to use inviduous, the one-tenth who clung to invidious would still be right, and they would be doing a favor to the majority if they continued to maintain the point’.”
Lepore continues: “It’s probably a good thing Macdonald isn’t around to browse through the Wiktionary, the online, user-written dictionary launched in 2002 by Wikipedia, and billed as the future of lexicography. There’s no show of hands at Wiktionary. There’s not even an editorial staff.”
The implication seems to be that opponents of the “legitimatization” of common usage in language would criticize “Wiki” developments simply because they’re “democratic.” Yet linguistic inclusiveness surely does not lead inevitably to the acceptance of all sources of information as (at least potentially) valid, I would think. Aren’t Wikis problematic (potentially) on other grounds? I wonder what Noah Webster would make of the Wiki phenomenon.
I am quite fascinated by the democratic potential offered by projects like Wikipedia and Wiktionary. In any project offering open participation and contestation there is a potential for abuse, yet Wikipedia has managed to protect itself and maintain a high level of quality. The journal Nature published a report comparing the accuracy of online entries from the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia and found that both had basically the same level of accuracy on science.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4840340.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm
I am much more familiar with the concept behind http://www.indymedia.org– a global network of open publishing websites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indymedia
I am a member of the Polish editorial collective. An open publishing policy means that Indymedia can potentially give voice and audience to constituencies which lacked a forum for expressing their ideas. It has served well in the global justice movement and anti-globalization movement, but it has faced major challenges over how content should be edited and over the development of protocols for weeding out offensive and illegal posts, while maintaining a forum for freedom of expression and an alternative to corporate media.
Reply to Agnieszka
Great post, Anthony. I suppose there no need to ask what Dwight Macdonald would have thought about wikis….
The primary problem I see with Wikipedia is that it has grown enormous so quickly, and the breadth and much of the depth of the content is so good that it provides cover for bad information or misinformation. No way I’d warn students away from it as a resource–I use it myself almost daily for this or that. Students do need, however, to be instructed on how to use it. We have to make sure students know what Wikipedia is, how content is developed there, and what “corroboration” is and why it’s important. These are good, easily teachable things. All students should learn a healthy skepticism that encourages them to consider just who produced what they’re looking at and why. Hopefully, they can take this skill into the real world with them and apply it to what they see on television, in the newspapers, and from their government.
Wikis in general are problematic in the same ways that other types of collaborative learning are problematic. They can be chaotic, and they work to destabilize the authority of the individual voice . But they are also promising in the same ways that other collaborative work is. For those of us who believe knowledge best evolves out of engagement and conversations and not solely from unidirectional transfer performed by experts, new collaborative tools such as wikis are enabling. But, like all teaching and learning tools, whether for research or for discourse, they should be used with purpose and with care.
Reply to Luke