NYer vs. Wikipedia vs. Onion: Onion wins again

Wikipedia is pretty cool, I suppose. I certainly look at it from time to time (though I obviously don’t consider it a definitive final source on anything that I’m writing about). So I was interested in the big New Yorker piece about Wikipedia. It’s good. And it’s been interesting to see how people react to it. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, people get really worked up about Wikipedia — like if you criticize it, you’re an elitist, but if you defend it, you’re a rube. So people tend to quote from the story in ways that back whatever their opinion was before reading the story.

I guess that’s probably why I’m going to quote this line:

Mob rule has not led to chaos. Wikipedia, which began as an experiment in unfettered democracy, has sprouted policies and procedures. At the same time, the site embodies our newly casual relationship to truth. When confronted with evidence of errors or bias, Wikipedians invoke a favorite excuse: look how often the mainstream media, and the traditional encyclopedia, are wrong!

I wish the piece had explored this a little more thoroughly. I think it’s right that there is a “newly casual relationship to truth” about these days — but why? Anyway, I really bring all this up solely as an excuse to link to this Onion story: Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence.

“It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary,” said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone. “At 750 years, the U.S. is by far the world’s oldest surviving democracy, and is certainly deserving of our recognition,” Wales said. “According to our database, that’s 212 years older than the Eiffel Tower, 347 years older than the earliest-known woolly-mammoth fossil, and a full 493 years older than the microwave oven.”