This flash briefing is all about West Seattle in Washington (WA) State.
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Good Day WS! Thanks for joining us for West Seattle Daily, Episode #016, brought to you by Sea-Town Real Estate. I'm your host, Christian Harris.
Normally we would reserve Thursday for our "throwbacks" but considering the date, we are changing it up...
This Wednesday we are throwing it back to January 15th, 2001, when the first edit was made on Wikipedia by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Since then, wikipedia has dubbed it's birthday as “Wikipedia Day”.
Love them or hate them, you have to admit they have made a large impact on how we view and think about information and knowledge... which I'll get more into in a couple minutes.
Wikipedia was made from the concept of compiling the world’s knowledge in a single location allowing anyone and everyone freedom to edit and share this knowledge. This was really the beginning of the mainstream movement of what is today known as "crowd sourcing".
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has stated that the concept for Wikipedia, came to him when he was a graduate student at Indiana University where he was impressed with the successes of the open-source movement and found Richard Stallman's Emacs Manifesto promoting free software and a sharing economy to be quite interesting.
Fun Facts about Wikipedia:
⁃ Anyone can edit Wikipedia and become a Wikipedian!
⁃ There are currently 38,027,802 Wikipedia accounts, of which 123,869 are actively editing.
⁃ As of December 2019, Wikipedia articles have been created in 307 languages
To quote some ideas from one of my favorite & thought provocative books, "The Next Story-Life & Faith After the Digital Explosion" by Tim Challies:
This is a shift from the traditional model of knowledge and authority though. Let's take a minute to talk about the down-side of such a movement of crowd sourcing information. Wikipedia is the democratization of information and on Wikipedia, the information is never final or complete and always changing. Anyone at anytime can make changes to a page, and I would argue that those who are motivated to spend their time adding or updating a wiki-page are more likely to have an agenda or bias. Wikipedia measure truth by consensus while Search Engines measure truth by relevance - both of them highlight issues relevant to discovering what is true in a digital world.
Knowledge has typically come from above, from the chosen few, the experts. Professors, pastors, Book Authors and others told us what is true about the world we live in. But all of this is now shifting in the digital world. It is now the consensus of the masses (crowd sourced like Wikipedia, social media & the internet in general) that informs our understanding. In the place of few experts we have many amateurs. New digital technologies function as a great leveler, reducing the authority of the expert and elevating the authority of the amateur. The life long theologian has no more authority than the young child, the teacher has no more authority than the pupil, the parent has no more authority than the child. As we undermine the authority inherent in knowledge, how long will it be before we undermine authority in other areas of life?
The more important the subject matter, the less you should rely on Wikipedia and other similar sites.
Just some food for thought. Let me know what you think.
