[WikiEN-l] Truthiness- Wikipedia Video

[Joseph Reagle]

This confusion about "truth" is tiresome [1]. It is completely possible for 
their to be a single objective (ontological) reality and corresponding 
*truth*, but to appreciate that we each have our own (epistemic) 
*perspective* and *understanding* which is imperfect -- as Wales indicates. 
I'm beginning to suspect that po-mo and conservative pundits continue this 
misunderstanding with each other so they can feel provocative or get 
attention. Macha says "there are many truths" and Keen states "when you 
democratize this, truth is the casualty." Oh, for heaven's sake: shame on 
both of them.

Keen's book was sloppy; my favorite critic of Wikipedia continues to be 
Robert McHenry who notes "I don't question the fact that there's a great 
deal of very good very solid information in Wikipedia, it could hardly be 
otherwise. By sheer chance there would be there some good stuff in there. 
My criticism is that there is some very very bad stuff, and there's no way 
to tell the difference" (30 minute). The "sheer chance" bit is true and 
made me laugh -- and this is the recurrent motif of monkeys banging on 
typewriters which, as I discuss in [2], has been a recurrent theme since 
Norbert Weiner decades ago, and even back to Gottfried Leibniz in 1680. But 
his criticism of telling the difference *is* important and amendable to 
improvement, though it appears to be a difficult problem. Some sort of 
approved content scheme for Wikipedia has been discussed often, and was 
even proposed and discussed 10 years earlier on Interpedia [3].

[1]:http://reagle.org/joseph/2006/disp/proposal.html#heading9
[[
...
In Theories of Truth, Richard Kirkham (1995:2) notes that notions of truth 
vary. When philosophers address the topic, they might be undertaking any 
number of projects, such as asking what is truth, what is it for something 
to be true, what do we mean by the terms truth and falsehood, what are 
criterion of truth, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions of a 
statement's truth? Or, perhaps they are providing a descriptive account of 
the use of "true," specifying criteria of evidence, or showing how truth 
conditions depend on sentence structure. Furthermore, philosophers pursuing 
these notions might often be vague in their description of their project, 
confusing in that they conflate the distinct projects above without 
realizing it, ambiguous in that they use the same words for different 
concepts (e.g., "myth" as false or "myth" as believed to be true by the 
individual), misleading in using different words for the same concepts 
(e.g., "transsubjective" and "objective"). Consequently, I will briefly 
touch upon the work of scholars concerned with communication to pose an 
understanding of subjective experience, common intersubjective ground, and 
shared hints of objectivity.
...
]]
[2]:http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/culture/wikipedia/annc-in-good-faith
[3]:http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1994q1/1003.html