CSotD: Wikipedia and the Will of God
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I have some problems with Wikipedia, but I think, on the whole, that its self-correcting structure actually works.
Often.
Depending on the topic.
But today's xkcd hits at a major vulnerability not just of Wikipedia but of history in particular and of writing in general, which is that, once they've found a citation, a lot of writers consider the case closed. And the on-line world has made finding "citations" a lot easier, which is not entirely Wikipedia's fault.
On the mouseover text (which I don't import with this comic and which you always ought to go read for yourself), Randall Munroe explains that the inspiration for the cartoon was a "pop-science" book in which the author stated facts that weren't facts but which were from Wikipedia.
Now, I think there is too much reflexive bagging on Wikipedia itself and the online world in general. Teachers who forbid kids to use these as sources are doing their students a disservice. But it is true that the easier it becomes to find facts, the easier it also becomes to find non-facts.
Which certainly does enable sloppy research, which, yes, increases the proliferation of non-facts, which … see above.
Example: A few years ago, I was looking for a one-shot feature for my educational program that would run in the paper the week of Christmas. Knowing that the schools were closed, I wanted something self-explanatory and not part of a series they might want to use in class. And because it was early in our dual wars, I was hoping for something about Christmas and those serving.
So I found an excerpt from a journal of a physician who had been at Valley Forge in that terrible winter, and it was interesting, moving and reflective of military/patriotic sacrifice and suchlike.
The problem was, it was an excerpt, and I wanted to see what else the fellow had to say, in case there was something more applicable. But, try as I would, I could only find that same passage, repeated several times on several sites.
So I called the national park at Valley Forge and got one of the rangers on the line who specializes in historical interpretation and asked him where I might find the whole text.
Turns out, there isn't one, because it's a forgery.
He explained that, during the Centennial, a lot of material was generated somewhat in the spirit of the lives of the saints, which, in that case are called "pious writings" but, outside of the lives of the saints are known as "well-intentioned bullshit."
This was not an invention of the Centennial, of course. Well before 1876, we had Parson Weems' popular biography of George Washington (1800) and Washington Irving's hagiographical study of Christopher Columbus (1828), for example. Nor did it stop in 1877.
These things come into popular culture and are absorbed into the stream of history, with only the most outrageous examples — like Little Georgie and the Cherry Tree — being widely known as fiction.
And we still have schoolchildren being taught about Little Georgie and the Cherry Tree, or that people in 15th Century Europe thought the world was flat, though perhaps not by the same teachers who will forbid them to use online sources for their writing.
In her introduction to the classic 1948 Catholic children's book, "Sixty Saints for Boys," Joan Windham writes: "Some of the things I have written about really did happen to the Saints, but some of the things I have written about are just Stories that people tell about them, and these Stories are called Legends. All the Legends could have happened if God had wanted it that way, and that, I think, is how most of them got started."
She goes on to explain that, while a particular story may not be true, it expresses how people felt about the historic person, so that they are true in that they summarize the character and popular image of the person.
Which is okay when you agree with the intent, not so good when you don't.
Poor Dan Quayle will be followed by the "potatoe" story to his grave, when he was only prompting the kid to spell the word the way the teacher had written it on the index card he had been handed.
And Al Gore is still mocked as having claimed to have "invented the Internet" when he didn't make that claim and the claim he did make — to have sponsored legislation funding its development — is true.
Mind you, we can track the Gore story to a factual, objective end. The Quayle story is less certain, because the index card explanation could be manufactured spin.
But, as Windham notes, these stories proliferate because they reflect what people want to believe.
Sometimes you can even find sources for legends that appear canonical.
Example: Following the defeat of the Armada, the Spanish fleet was forced to go north and west, around Great Britain and Ireland, to return home, and not all the ships, damaged as they were, made it. What happened to the shipwrecked Spanish depends on your sources.
The story most often told is that they struggled on shore only to be robbed and killed by the Irish peasantry, and there are particularly good contemporaneous sources for this story, because it was planted by Elizabeth's own spinmeisters as part of a campaign to weaken any potential Catholic fifth column of the era.
But you'll also learn — from respectable Irish sources — that the poor shipwrecked men were welcomed and taken in under the banner of traditional Irish hospitality, only to have English overlords seize them for execution. It's a great pro-Irish story, but the contrast between utter nobility and bestial violence seems a bit tidy for real history.
And then you'll also get the folk-legend version, which is that the Spanish sailors simply made themselves at home in their new country, intermarried with the local populace and became the genetic source for black-haired Irish.
This version of history would be more convincing if a larger percentage of Spaniards were dark haired, if a genetically significant number of Spanish sailors had washed up on the Irish west coast and, most important, if the Spanish and Irish genotypes were not already pretty strongly intermingled from back when the Celts were in Spain.
But it could have happened that way, if God had wanted it to.
So don't blame Wikipedia. Blame God.
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