Democracy and Internet (English)

Now I am studying Masters degree.

The other day, one of my teachers said "please note that Wikipedia is not considered to be a valid information source, as all you guys know."

Of course I knew that. Almost all universities around the world prohibit citing Wikipedia as a reference.

Today, I would like to think about this.

(I dont have intention to be rebellious. Im a obedient guy... This is just an objective analysis about this issue...hahaha!!)

Why can't Wikipedia be a valid information source?

It is because everybody can edit it and therefore, the information might not be correct.

So, the fact that everybody can edit it is the primary reason why they prohibit citing Wikipedia.

It seems obvious that they prohibit it and students normally accept this norm.

Wait, IS IT THAT OBVIOUS?

When I was in the undergraduate university, I did an interesting test.

In the test, I intentionally wrote wrong information on Wikipedia. For example, "The Second World War finished in 2010."

Then, it was corrected in about 10 minutes, which means that somebody in the world corrected it after I intentionally wrote wrong information on Wikipedia.

From this experiment, we can observe that the possibility of coming across the obviously wrong information is quite low.

Actually, millions of people are looking at Wikipedia everyday. Therefore, we can say that articles of Wikipedia are percolated many times by many people.

We can think of Wikipedia as a knowledge refinery where ordinary people evaluate knowledge and the most common opinion is reflected.

As we can observe from the experiment above, the philosophy behind Wikipedia is

"Even though some people make mistakes or intentionally write bad things, we can restrain that negative effect by making Wikipedia open to everybody and let them check everything on it."

Concisely, the philosophy behind Wikipedia is "the majority of people are good. therefore, we can believe in it"

To think about Wikipedia a bit more, let's think about the opposite of Wikipedia, which is Britannica, the biggest off-line encyclopedia in the world. In universities, of course, we are allowed to cite Britannica as a valid information source.

So, is the information on Britannica always correct? Maybe. Because Britannica is edited by specialists and prestigious scholars of the topic.

The philosophy behind Britannica is "what specialists and scholars say is correct because ordinary people may make mistakes"

It is intuitively acceptable.

But is it? Don't specialist and scholars make mistakes? Is their judgement and opinion always correct than that of ordinary people?

Let me summarize the important points.

The philosophy behind Wikipedia is "the majority of people are good. therefore, we can believe in it."

whereas

The philosophy behind Britannica is "what specialists and scholars say is correct because ordinary people may make mistakes."

Which do you think is true?

Well, since there is no absolute truth in the world, we cannot say which one is true.

However, for me, at least, the first one fits into the democratic philosophy.

The democratic philosophy is "what majority of people say is correct."

(Of course, it is not all about democratic values but at least it is one of the central principle. Im not saying that we dont have to take what minority of people say into account.)

Therefore, we chose political candidates by election and let them implement their policies.

The philosophy of Wikipedia gets along with that of Democracy.

On the other hand, isn't the philosophy of Britannica similar to that of Aristocracy?

Joi Ito, once said that Internet is not just about technology but also about philosophy.

The important point of internet is that there is no central authority. There is nobody who controls and administrates the entire internet system.

The internet is managed by individuals or individual organizations and the gathering of them is the world wide web.

Given this suitability of internet philosophy to democratic philosophy, internet could be a powerful tool to promote democracy.

So, should university allow students to cite Wikipedia? hahaha!!