Watered down Wikipedia: political correctness, history and consensus

In an earlier post I discussed issues around recorded history and I want to elaborate on that a bit because it really is one of the core topics of this blog.
Essentially, I think that the internet, and Web 2.0 in particular, has the potential to allow us the opportunity to lessen the chances of a skewed, biased or manipulated version of historical events being passed on or taught as fact. I was born and raised in South Africa, and I know that some of what I was taught at school in regards to the countries’ history and colonisation had been positioned in my school textbooks to ensure that we never entertained questions about South Africas colonisation and the methods undertaken to achieve it. I am sure this is the same in many Western countries. Colonisation was all about ‘discovery’ and ‘adventure’ and those who embarked in those initial journeys were ‘brave’ and ‘heroes’. And sure, they probably were pretty brave and for them it was all about the adventure and discovery, but at no stage was I taught about that period of history from an indigenous perspective. If I had been, would it have framed my ideas about the political strife of the country in a different way?

I think you can probably see what I am getting at here; that the ability to debate matters of historical relevance in order to come to a consensus on them (even if the consensus is a differentiation of opinion) on a platform which allows all with access to see the debate in its entirety would, a) mean that the accounts of that event were as close to the truth as possible and, b) that general opinions on certain issues stemmed from a place of truthful representation of those events, rather than a biased or false one. The results of this I could dream about for days, but, of course, no system exists at present which could really initiate or mobilise this kind of discourse. Once again, the closest thing we have at present is Wikipedia and although it goes far to lay the groundwork it is also at present very young and somewhat flawed. For example, how many Wikipedia users actually read the discussion pages behind an article. Probably this is dependant on the kind of information sought, but this leads me to my next set of questions: how can users rest assured that they are able to retrieve all the relevant information from Wikipedia when with mass collaboration comes debate and thus compromise as to what is the truth or is relevant and what is not? The risk for the egalitarian model of the Internet as I have laid out is then that “collaborative intelligence leads to bland compromises; collective intelligence to populism and even to tunnel vision.” According to Marijn de Waal, the results “may be democratic but it is not good for society or for the quality of cultural production”.

I wrote an essay on this recently and used this as my example: During the late 20th Century a common place topic to joke about was how political correctness had become so pertinent to society that everything in the end had been watered down so much so as not to offend anyone, to an almost ridiculous point. The classic example of this is the attempts at banning and reediting of Enid Blyton’s Noddy books as a result of the main characters close friendship with Big Ears, which some took to imply a covert homosexual relationship. The subsequent Noddy publications and television shows therefore carefully omit subject matter which could be read as (homo)sexual, namely instances where Big Ears might have stayed the night at Noddy’s house. For a child, sleep over’s are an innocent part of growing up and is important for personal confidence and social bonding, and yet in this context that activity was omitted from the work due to the existence of a possibility that it may be perceived the wrong way.

The ‘Noddy’ page on Wikipedia fails to mention the controversy surrounding Big Ears and only briefly refers to the well-known controversy involving the black-faced Golliwogg characters, which happened in the early 1960s. Through attempts to be neutral the article fails to properly address an instance of social importance (an open discussion of media represented racism during the civil rights movement), instead stating that the inclusion of the Golliwoggs dolls were omitted due to the characters “fall[ing] out of favour” – falling out of favour with whom is not addressed.

Wikipedia’s ‘Noddy’ page concerns itself with description and reserves the ideological discussions for the ‘discussions’ page. The success of Wikipedia in embodying Charles Leadbetters We-Think model relies heavily on the inclusion of a discussion board for each topic and the transparency of the platform itself, as mentioned in an earlier post. Although a seemingly irrelevant example in the context of historical events and accuracy of representation, it illustrates the point that de Waal makes above and highlights the infancy in the development of such an online system.

Although obviously flawed, Wikipedia offers us a preview of what should be expected from Web 2.0 and the future of the Internet. It offers us a taste of what is possible when (almost) everyone is forwarded the opportunity to input their knowledge into a system which records all human knowledge; in effect participating in a massive discussion about the truth of our collective histories, while at the same time debating with and educating each other. Through these platforms is the potential for history to be no longer written only by the winners.