TRUTHINESS: RESPONDING JESSICA’S ARTICLE

What a girl…There are so many things in Jessica’s entries. Creative thinking, fair criticism, fun, life, sensation, nostalgia…I like her style because she writes like she talks and catches my attention easily. She is also persuasive because she provides the facts accurately and dauntlessly. I do completely agree with her comments about Wikipedia-Truhtiness dilemma, I’m fascinated with Jessica’s approach to the issue. Let’s remember what she wrote in her entry, The Trouble with Truthiness.

 ”My problem with Wikipedia’s devotion to truthiness is that it values heart over fact. It favors what one dream as oppose to what one sees. That’s dangerous because the heart is too abstract to qualify. It’s impulsive. Facts, on the other hand, are tangible and retraceable. “
I would like to extend the controversy. Thus heart is too abstract to qualify; we can’t prevent subjective and relative information that place in Wikipedia anyway. We have already seen that on Wikiscanner projects. Institutions, companies, people who have some affiliations with them do not hesitate to be supplier of TRUTHINESS.

I do not mean that we have to have kind of dictatorship or censorship to rule on every article we’ve entered or edited. Of course I do not. Wikipedia can remain as an alternate and easy way to reach at practical data-base but it can’t impose like an objective and neutral source.

Moreover this is why newspapers, encyclopedias exits. We need to trust them. Otherwise truthiness term will terminate everything we used to know before. This might seem as an exaggerated chaotic picture but if we do not support grassroots media as much as new media tools I have a sense that we will experience this in early future.

Ok understandable. The both new media tools and grassroots media have pros and cons. Technology has made new media tools more accessible and easier than others. This is not enough to answer my question. How about evaluation, confirmation, news worthiness? I am not talking about seeking truth because in this case it is not that much easy to find what the truth is.

Let’s go back to Jessica’s comment again.
“To say that George Washington did not own slaves is a blatant lie. Of course he did. An infinite number of American white men of means living during the 17th and 18th centuries owned slaves. No offense to wikiality (though that’s a really adorable nick name), but that was reality. It’s not a comfortable reality to recall, but it is reality nonetheless. In denying that, one denies American History as well. More, if facts about slavery can be erased, so can facts about the Holocaust, the Iraq War death toll and Janjaweed militia attacks. Everything becomes subject to web user whim and/or discomfort. That scares me. “

As she pointed out denying, refurbishing, imposing, propaganda were not easy that much before Wikipedia. Frankly we are forced to accept wikipedia as an ideal way to learn. I don’t have to applaud EVERYTHING that new media brings to our lives.