You're in a part of the world where everybody's got a case, a story, a pitch, an angle. All day you listen to them. What do you long for? Wikipedia. You can't wait to get back to your hotel room and call it up. Did those things really happen? In that way? Oooooh, they didn't. Well, I won't trust that person any more.
Who can you trust around here? The man or woman far away, speaking through your laptop. Why? Because he's got a lot of other people keeping watch on him, following rules, making him follow rules. First rule: maintain a neutral point of view. No advocacy. No slanting. Go partisan and we'll throw your piece out. Second rule: anticipate challenges. Be right there with back-up, a cited source your doubter can check. Third rule: talk it over with your fellow editors and writers — "in a respectful and civil manner, even when you disagree." No personal attacks. No sneering. That's the way differences get ironed out.
That, from the Wikipedia policy page, is cool. Academic cool. You don't realize how much it means to you until you can't tune in on it. Your browser's not compatible, the server's down, the hotel's screwed it up, the goddam computer doesn't work. You've gone a whole day, maybe two, maybe (once) three, without hearing a single cool voice — one, anyway, that could stay cool to the end. Then..ah, there it is. First, disambiguation. Then the layout. "Here's the way the subject is divided." Then the division. Nature sliced at her joints. Then the hard thought, the care, and finally, cash on the barrelhead, there it is. The anonymous scholar in the distance is there with the goods. Oh brother, I believe.
It's not that you get answers, the truth, from Wikipedia. It's that you get effort toward it. Strenuous effort. Testing, checking, doubting, discussing. And never saying, "That's it, wrap it up." The effort may fail but you know that your odds on it here are the best you can hope for.
Who gave us such a thing? I put the question to Wikipedia. Proposed in 1999 by Richard Stallman. There are the other names, with credit judiciously apportioned: Wales, Sanger, Cunningham. There's a picture, twelve of them, unidentified, in 2000. Not a gray hair in sight.
I see good students of English Composition. I have already explained what I take English Composition to be: an essential introduction to the values of the academic tradition, and specifically to those values as conceived in the Enlightenment and formulated in the scientific method (see Posts 45 and120). It's all pretty well packed into what my textbook told students in the argument section: "Cite evidence, anticipate objections, watch out for absolute generalizations, beware of catch-all explanations, don't evade the question, don't sneer."
So there they are, those twelve, some of them looking so young they could have been on the front row yesterday. Ah, man, they really took it in. Good students. Good kids. Way to go.
