Lanier doesn't know (anything!)

Commentary on Lanier’s essay

Jaron Lanier is completely off base in his criticism of the collective “hive-mind” that makes up websites such as Wikipedia. His misunderstanding of the uses and importance of Wikipedia in our society along with his personal bias against his Wikipedia article, lead him on this directionless rant about collectivity.

Wikipedia’s purpose has never been and will never be to provide the most complete or verifiable information. It’s never going to delve into exact details and it’s never going to list hundreds of viewpoints on controversial subjects. The website is an easy to access collective of internet information. If I want to find basic information on a subject, instead of scanning through ten web pages of questionable authenticity, Wikipedia sums it up in an easy to manage package.

Lanier criticizes Wikipedia’s lack of voice, saying “A voice should be sensed as a whole,” not as a collective of information. This just evidences that Lanier doesn’t understand Wikipedia. Why does an article need a “tone” when it’s supposed to be an unbiased source of information? I never looked for underlying currents in the paragraphs of my high school history textbooks; they were straight-forward, with no underlying tones making up an “editorial voice.”

He goes on to complain about the deterioration of higher media because of the collection, insulting the New York Times for publishing an editorial opinion piece supporting intelligent design. This example illustrates his lack of understanding of anything – an opinion piece isn’t supposed to represent news; the paper published it to illustrate the viewpoint of the millions of individuals who support the teaching of Intelligent Design in school. Lanier doesn’t grasp the concept and reasoning behind anything; his thought processes are tantamount with a child’s - all on a surface level.

Wikipedia was designed as a hub to share information. You could add information about topics you knew about and learn about topics you weren’t familiar with from other people’s contributions. It was not designed as a replacement for actual reference books, which come complete with cites and legitimate sources. While Wikipedia has improved in quality during the past few years (it now has articles which are frequently backed up with clear cites from research papers), it’s still a jumble of information which has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Lanier’s best suggestion regarding a general knowledge solution better that Wikipedia seems to be Google searching countless web pages until you get all the information you want. Instead of having information brought together by people on the internet, he wants to leave it scattered and random. Just like the article he wrote. Until Jaron Lanier can write a cohesive article that doesn’t meander around random invalid points, he should probably stay off of Wikipedia (and stick to directing movies).