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After reading an informal survey of medical students using wikipedia to look up unfamiliar clinical topics I was struck with a somewhat chilling thought:  ”Have we finally traded truth for verifiability?”

I didn’t just fall off the BBS truck.  I feel I have a fairly good understanding of these connected servers we used to call the world wide web, and I understand intrinsically that reading something on the internet doesn’t mean that its true, but I am frequently disturbed by the amount of “research” that is cited as having been pulled from Wikipedia.  For those of you who haven’t read this before, here’s the threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia:

The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true.

Again, verifiability, not truth.  The difference is clear, verifiability is merely an agreed upon authority, whereas truth is the elusive underlying constant that philosophers search for, and the core of what we classify as knowledge (in the episemological sense of the word).  Broken down to the extreme sense, if “authoritative sources” say “the world is flat” then Wikipedia will include it, students will cite it, and public opinion will validate it.

Now as any marketer (or high school class president) can tell you, manufacturing authority is not a difficult task, especially in the online realm.  Knowledge is not required, only popularity.  The more popular an idea, whether true or false, the more likely it will be accepted.

Some of my teacher friends frequently complain about students citing Wikipedia in their research papers.  I understand their complaints, but the reality is that not only is Wikipedia accessible and easy to use, but North America’s most popular search engine considers it a high authority (and news source)!  The dice are loaded when it comes to actual online research which, ironically, HTML was built for (well, scientific documentation… but close enough).

It is for this reason why I don’t buy the “newsprint is dead” argument anymore than I buy the “record industry is dead” argument.  Both industries are amidst a paradigm shift, and sales are dropping because they don’t quite understand why they were successful in the first place: they established themselves as authorities.  I believe, when the dust settles, people will inevitably crave substance over style…

Well, at least one would hope so.