Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/April 2024/Op-ed


 * By Hawkeye7

Last week I attended a public lecture by Craig Stockings, the Australian military historian who is the general editor of the Official History of Australian Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Australian Peacekeeping Operations in East Timor, the sixth and latest Australian official history series. The public lecture (well nominally; there did not seem to be many of the general public there, but we had people like Paul Dibb and David Horner in the audience) was in honour of the late Robert O'Neil, who wrote the third, the two-volume Australia in the Korean War 1950–53. There was a discussion about who had the harder task; my money is on Stockings. (O'Neil did not have to deliver a lecture on the Korean war with Robert Menzies glaring at him.)

In his essay entitled the Death of Wikipedia, noted three existential threats to the Wikipedia:
 * 1) The Foundation screws up and blows its endowment. Not very likely, but possible; this sort of thing has happened. The island state of Nauru lost its endowment through gross mismanagement.
 * 2) The breakup of the internet. In this scenario, the United States pulls out of the internet and the Wikipedia breaks up into its constituent languages. This balkanisation is an ever-present threat that rears its ugly head from time to time. Again, it is not likely, but similar things have happened in the past.
 * 3) Artificial intelligence. This is a looming threat no longer on the horizon. What we do is aggregate sources into articles. But what if this task could be done by computers instead of by hand? What if Google could bypass the Wikipedia and generate articles on the fly in response to requests? Will Wikipedia go the way of the Encyclopaedia Britannica?

Which brings us back to Stockings's official history. The first volume, on East Timor, chronicles events that occurred around the turn of the century, in 1999-2000. The internet and the web existed, but most documentation was still on paper. When it comes to Iraq and Afghanistan, 21st century conflicts, that was no longer the case. Everything is in electronic form. Literally tens of millions of electronic documents; emails, diaries, sitreps, essays, chat logs, the works. More than anyone can possibly read through. So how can this be processed?

Artificial intelligence. Computer programs search through the electronic landscape and mine, locate and cross-reference the documents on a particular subject on request. You initiate a query about something, and everything relevant is presented. The military historian takes it from there. This is necessary, but troubling, as the point where the computer programs stop and the human takes over is necessarily arbitrary.