Perhaps the recent dimming of Wikipedia, for 24 hours on January 18, (and other notable websites) in protest of the planned online privacy legislation in the U.S. Congress, wasn’t all that bad.
Many would argue that Wikipedia has been a great boon in democratizing content authorship and disseminating information. So, when it temporarily shuttered its online doors, many shuddered from withdrawal. Yet, this “always on”, instantly available, crowdsourced resource is undermining an important human trait: intellectual curiosity.
When Wikipedia went off-air many of us, including Jonathan Jones, were forced to search a little deeper and a little longer for facts and information. In doing so, it reawakened our need to discover, connect, and conceptualize for ourselves, rather than take as rote the musings of the anonymous masses, just one click away. Yes, we exercised our brains a little harder that day.
[div class=attrib]By Jonathan Jones over at the Guardian:[end-div]
I got really excited this morning. Looking up an artist online – Rembrandt, if you want to know – I noticed something different. As usual, the first item offered was his Wikipedia entry. But after a few seconds, the Rembrandt page dissolved into a darkened screen with a big W and an explanation I was too thrilled to read at that moment. Wikipedia offline? Wikipedia offline! A new dawn for humanity …
Only after a couple of glasses of champagne did I look again and realise that Wikipedia is offline only for 24 hours, in protest against what it sees as assaults on digital freedom.
OK, so I’m slightly hamming that up. Wikipedia is always the first site my search engine offers, for any artist, but I try to ignore it. I detest the way this site claims to offer the world’s knowledge when all it often contains is a half-baked distillation of third-hand information. To call this an encyclopedia is like saying an Airfix model is a real Spitfire. Actually, not even a kit model – more like one made out of matchsticks.
I have a modest proposal for Wikipedia: can it please stay offline for ever? It has already achieved something remarkable, replacing genuine intellectual curiosity and discovery with a world of lazy, instant factoids. Can it take a rest and let civilisation recover?
On its protest page today, the website asks us to “imagine a world without free knowledge”. These words betray a colossal arrogance. Do the creators of Wikipedia really believe they are the world’s only source of “free knowledge”?
Institutions that offer free knowledge have existed for thousands of years. They are called libraries. Public libraries flourished in ancient Greece and Rome, and were revived in the Renaissance. In the 19th century, libraries were built in cities and towns everywhere. What is the difference between a book and Wikipedia? It has a named author or authors, and they are made to work hard, by editors and teams of editors, to get their words into print. Those words, when they appear, vary vastly in value and importance, but the knowledge that can be gleaned – not just from one book but by comparing different books with one another, checking them against each other, reaching your own conclusions – is subtle, rich, beautiful. This knowledge cannot be packaged or fixed; if you keep an open mind, it is always changing.
[div class=attrib]Read the whole article here.[end-div]