In Praise of Wikipedia

I have this feeling that people in the future are going to talk about wikipedia as an important metaphor for understanding our time. The more I think about it, the more it seems an emblem of where we are in terms of western culture and the history of ideas. And I think it's such an optimistic sign. The very audacity of it strikes me sometimes. It fits with a view of the past thousand years or so as this unstoppable progression of decentralization of power and knowledge. The global-wide movement toward democracy is a part of that disintegration, as is the splitting up of the monolithic church into hundreds of thousand of sects, as is the rise of relativism (and the theory of relativity, for that matter) and the secular religion of individual freedom and the celebration of diversity.

By the way, each of those movements had their enemies, and one by one they all lost. I take that to mean that though conservatives may seem to be stopping progress in our time, if we take the long view they are about as effective at stopping change as mice trying to keep a glacier from melting. And though I think that progression is largely good, it is not as purely good as most liberal-minded people think; that is, it hasn't come without heavy costs.

One of the good things, I'd argue, Wikipedia is the latest sign of that slow change. Encyclopedias used to be issued from on high, handed from the mountain like stone tablets. But an encyclopedia that arises as the product of many views, one whose entries are permanently changing, mutating, whose meaning is meant never to be etched in stone--that's something new.