Wikipedia reflects median internet common knowledge, not emergent truth

Evidence

I cannot resist highlighting the irony that Wikipedia, the purported poster child of neoliberalism, cannot even manage to get its own internal entry on neoliberalism straight. But that irony is achieved at too low a price: after all, Wikipedia can’t manage to get much of anything straight for very long (unless it is so arcane and dull that no precocious 12-year-old ever feels tempted to “edit” the entry). What it does manage to do is capture what passes for common knowledge of the median participant on the Internet at some specific point in time. The conviction that the truth “emerges” from random interactions of variously challenged participants in the precincts of Wiki-world (sometimes retailed in the popular press as “the wisdom of crowds”) only holds water if we are allowed great latitude in the definition of “truth.” Neoliberals have great faith in the marketplace of ideas; and for them, the truth is validated as what sells. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2103

Categorization

• SEED: The argument that crowdsourcing produces median common knowledge rather than emergent truth could seed a piece on what Wikipedia’s treatment of contested ideological terms reveals about internet epistemology vs. expert textual authority.
• XREF: connects to: Early 2000s scholars debated Wikipedia’s reliability as a knowledge source — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2156; Wikipedia embodied the internet’s democratizing promise of universal knowledge — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 264; Personalized internet feeds destroyed shared common knowledge and split the public into oppositional realities (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Wikipedia embodied the internet’s democratizing promise of universal knowledge #qualifies (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 264
• Early 2000s scholars debated Wikipedia’s reliability as a knowledge source #corroborates (0.72) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2156
• Personalized internet feeds destroyed shared common knowledge and split the public into oppositional realities #complicates (0.72)
• Consensus-based truth theories cannot justify specific assertions #complicates (0.70) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 434
• The internet’s many-to-many ideal collapsed into a many-to-one structure #corroborates (0.70) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 175
• Modern knowledge is more opaque to individuals than pre-modern local knowledge was #complicates (0.70) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 348