Lie to me and call me wiki! - Knowledge evolution.
"We need to focus on getting laid" -Jon told me. We were young and Fantabaires (an Argentine fantasy convention) was bursting with people dressed up as anime characters.
I still hadn't started my career(s), but Jon's logic was perfect to my point of view. At that age, any theory that implied genital interaction sounded wonderful. A year later, the survival of the academically fittest started (we've a 1 year "pre-grade" to join the university), and five later I got a degree.
Jon played the guitar, he never opened a biology book in his life, but his "we need to focus in getting laid" left a trail that lasted over a decade. When I was about to finish my career, I grabbed everything I had learned and understood that it only meant something as long as I could see it through evolutionary eyes. So, Darwin, speaking in a very rough way, said that everything that was alive was because it was focused in only one thing: "getting laid"
How does this apply to knowledge?
The holy natural selection works in mysterious ways, and this vals between chaos, variability, selection and order filter absolutely everything that grows in an organic way, including knowledge. The Yin and Yang of messing and cleaning; yes, Taoism is throwing us a hint once again.
The thing is trying to understand how does the famous Natural selection sneaks into the topic to become relevant when we talk about Wikipedia, a communal database. A swarm of "nobodys" that infinitely edit the same paragraph of text.
They seek something that resembles generating knowledge in a way that is totally opposite to the conventional, the academic aim of a hardened core of specialized professionals working in a text, checking and rechecking it under a deeply endogamic method and release it to the world finished, with no possibility to correct a misplaced comma (that one one that is guilty of your night terrors), accusing you for its worthless existence.
These two ways of building up knowledge were tested in a paper that was published by the Nature magazine. In this epic battle, Wikipedia's hive of "nobodys" was measured against the megasuperarchidoctors of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica", in a simple and elegant way: They grabbed a couple of articles about scientific topics (forty-something) and gave them to experts to check and correct them... Without telling them if were from Wikipedia or from the Britannica. The science Pepsi Challenge.
Every article was dissected, studied, seen, separated in black and white, washed, centrifuged and hanged to the sun. Once the data was analyzed, the errors highlighted, and data tabulated; the results were amazing and painfully elegant: It turned out that the amorphous mass of people and the fistful couple of experts were, pretty much as right as the other.
Wikipedia and the Britannica had about the same test results, at least for sciences.
What about other topics? Not only sciences.
So, the same challenge was applied several times since that one, but under different topics (biographies, politics, sports, culture, geography, medicine, history, religion), and basically... Got the same results: Wikipedia's method works.
Yeah the articles were mixed up, awfully redacted, yet the hard data was good and, above everything, amazingly updated.
The interesting part was seeing that the main consistency issue that was found in Wikipedia was at contemporary articles and "opinion" where the decisive event was subjective to ideologies. As a matter of fact, the most violent events had their own names: "Wikipedia Wars" and the podium is for the topics "George W. bush", "anarchy" and "Mahoma".
So, what works?
We see the birth of a true fight for the "ministry of the past", a branded need to manipulate history "as is", and above all things, a noxious behavior born at Wikipedia that cannot be seen ever before in history. There's only just more evidence of something that really always happened: the overwriting of memories to better fit the needs of a dominant class, negation. Wikipedia, with it's low difficulty to "edit" data like that, is a dangerous tool when used for "delicate" matters. It is part of a natural selection process. Where only the fittest (for the job) survive.
A constant clash to see who has, literally speaking, the last word and the last version of that difficult paragraph. Where the Britannica wins because of its solidity, Wikipedia replies with a fluid response, mutating, generating new options; and sometimes, using better data than others. Brilliant, beautiful, yet: just pandas trying to stay alive.
Two survival strategies, in this corner: the solid and loyal Britannica. In the other corner: A clumsy massive, unorganized and ever-evolving Wikipedia. both competing for the 1st place spot at "knowledge source".
Both, competing to see who gets laid, and survives. We still don't know who will prevail.
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