Not In My Book

Something you can believe in….

OK.

Like many people I might, from time to time, google my own name to see how many hits I get. Just once or twice…. (38,531).

And I might take a look at Wikipedia to see what it says about me.

And over the past two years it has said some pretty strange stuff.

“the Jewish producer”

“Liar”

“Zionist”

The entries have gone up and down, around and around, defaced, re-written, redacted, protected, un-protected, and as of now, deleted entirely.

It’s a strange place, this Wikipedia.

All of which makes me think about Jeff Jarvis’ question, which I have myself raised many times:

“If you were going to start an encyclopedia today, would you rather hire a group of Oxford dons and lock them away in a library for 20 years, or would you rather open the process up to millions of people to contribute?”

There is an old joke that says: ‘A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged’.

Having been mugged on Wikipedia, I now am beginning to think that I would rather have the collected wisdom of our culture curated by the Oxford dons than by the ‘masses’. Thank you.

A few years ago, I read a lovely book entitled The Professor and the Madman by Simon WInchester.

It’s the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (a copy of which I stil have on my shelf).

The dictionary was begun in 1857 and it took 70 years to complete.  But this book is really the story of Professor James Murray, the editor fo the OED, and his collaboration with an American contributor, Chester Minor.

A bit like Wikipedia, the OED had thousands of contributors from around the world and Minor was but one of them.  What makes the book fascinating was that Minor spent his life in a mental hospital, Broadmoore, a murderer and clinically insane.

But more to the point, what made and makes the OED so precise is that it was a collaboration between the thousands of contributors and a dedicated, professional and full time editorial staff.

This is what is lacking at Wikipedia… and in most of the googley projects as they emerge.

The theory of ‘the wisdom of the masses’ is great, but you need an intelligence behind it.

Otherwise you end up with… well, for the most part, an ever shifting pile of junk.

When it comes to a brain surgeon operating on me, I would really rather have the Harvard Medical School grad who has dedicated his life to his craft… as opposed to opening up my head to the online folks who are interested in playing.

Likewise opening up my head to the ‘wisdom of the masses’.

Sorry.

What make the Oxford English Dictionary so good is the fact that Murray did not let the inmates run the institution – just contribute to it.