User:Ragesoss/Manifesto

Ragesoss Manifesto
Or

Why I Am a Wikipedian
The Enlightenment is dead. It probably died on August 6, 1945. Physics at last knew sin, and the disintegration of the atom was just the symbolic coup de grâce of the crumbling hopes of the unity of all knowledge. By then, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics had pretty much destroyed the epistemology of the physical sciences (which was generally considered the only suitable foundation for the rest of the sciences, in the 19th- and 20th-century iterations of the Encyclopedic hierarchy), even while philosophers were looking to science and math as the epistemological foundations for everything else. And when the war to end all wars didn’t end all wars, it started to sink in that science and technology didn’t automatically bring enlightenment after all. Even so, techno-scientific enthusiasm reached new heights as the world’s two superpowers faced off in their epic struggle for the soul of the world (or so they thought). And despite the relative decline of traditional educational priorities, scholarship in the social sciences and humanities flourished as well. The path was set, and by 1991, the disciplinary structures for the proliferation of specialist knowledge were so entrenched that the end of the Cold War was hardly a bump in road, even if we no longer knew where we were going. Hence, the "postmodern condition".

The problem is not ultimately that postmodern ideas threaten to undermine rationality (Ha! As if people took humanists and social scientists that seriously). To the degree that postmodern ideas have intellectual traction, they are simply recognizing the state of human knowledge as it is, rather than how it is idealized: fragmentary knowledge; ultra-specialization; the ivory tower mentality that disparages popularization and dissemination; the abandonment of mass culture to infotainment and truthiness. There’s too much knowledge out there, requiring too much training to comprehend, for anyone bounded by finite human mentality and a finite human lifetime to make sense of, so we don’t even make the attempt. The intellectuals who talk of "synthesis" and "unity of knowledge" now are basically advocating the revival of strong reductionism (in the hope that biology will make a stronger epistemological foundation than physics did), the consecration of scientists as the high priests of the cultural and social as well as the physical and biological. The ideal of the Renaissance person is gone; only the dilettante remains.

Enter the history of science and technology. As practitioners are fond of saying, we define science as "knowledge" and technology as "practice". Take history up to today, and the history of science and technology is the study of everything anyone has ever thought or done; philosophy, garden-variety history, the natural and social sciences, literature, art, music and so on are sub-fields. Most historians of science don’t take it this far (out loud), but they do have a strong tendency to address themselves to the big questions.

But playing with definitions doesn’t actually solve any problems. Scholarly disciplines, history of science included, still have the problem of communication (i.e., the problem of storytelling). Effective storytelling is something that the scientific community as a whole simply fails at, and ironically the humanist disciplines (e.g., history) are nearly as bad. Ever-increasing depth of knowledge is fine and dandy, but it serves to further insulate an already insular group; effective mass communication ought to be the goal. While the more practical branches of science might be able to justify their work in terms of the tangible technical payoffs that society gets from it, evolutionary biologists, historians, and most other types of scholars can only justify their professional existence through the general enrichment of society. Technical monographs and detailed case histories are proximate goals to enhance the collective knowledge of a specialist community and body of literature, but scholars ought always to keep an eye on the larger goal of distilling the broad and deep scope of that literature into stories for the rest of society.

Enter Wikipedia, one of the easiest and most effective means of actually applying specialist knowledge to reshape public understanding. In the current academic culture, the extent of intellectual outreach is the public lecture or interview, or the occasional late-career book that aims at a (very limited) popular audience (along with the requisite scholarly one). The only historical work that really makes it into public consciousness is what the media industries ask for from historians; Wikipedia (among other venues) is a chance for disciplines to shape their own public destinies and forge their own places in mass culture. Through the 20th century and into the 21st, the baseline of cultural literacy (at least in the developed world) has been increasingly determined by entertainment and broadcast news. The good news is that Wikipedia has quickly become a staple of internet culture and, increasingly, popular culture more broadly. Whetting appetites for a new hybrid of mass culture infotainment and well-rounded (encyclopedic) knowledge will hopefully lay the groundwork for a more thorough re-integration of a liberal education with entertainment and mass media; first Wikipedia, then Hollywood, then the world. The bad news is that most academics still don't think Wikipedia is worth their time (and the rampant scientism and anti-elitism don't help either).

So join the History of Science WikiProject or one of it's sub-projects (i.e., anything) and help save the world one article at a time.

Comments welcome
This is a brilliant explanation of why Wikipedia is both attractive and important. I too hope that Wikipedia will reshape, at least to some small degree, the public's relationship with knowledge. I'm glad I saw your link at User:Linuxbeak/Wikimania 2006/Wikipedian Survey! &mdash; Catherine\talk 03:15, 29 April 2006 (UTC)


 * An excellent read...though you may want to include something about the role of collective intelligence in Wikipedia.Smallman12q (talk) 17:14, 25 July 2010 (UTC)