The Facts and the Stakes
or, Why Wikipedia Doesn’t Cut It: How You Can, and Why You Should, Raise Your Research Standards
This is the third in the series Get Your Facts Straight: Research Skills for Writers. For more about this 18-part series, including the complete schedule and links to the other articles in the series, click here.
for JStein
We live in a time and a place where we experience routine injury to our sense of trust. It has become difficult for many of us to know what to believe and on what basis we should risk believing anything at all. The problem has been getting worse and the occasions more frequent. In the public sphere particularly, lies, fakes, and deceptions are so commonplace that a Presidential campaign was just won partially on the basis of falsehood, mendacity, and flat-out fiction. These were deployed — like all effective propaganda — to play not only on people’s fears and their prejudices, but to exploit the difficulty of verifying the information and the “information” involved.
It has always taken effort to locate and verify facts. It’s gotten a lot harder recently. The world’s information streams have become exponentially more complex within the space of two generations. The sheer quantity of information available to us is so vast, and the nature of the electronically enabled and linked world allows such radical widening of who can produce and disseminate information and how much gets created, that regardless of whether that information is good or bad or somewhere in between there is simply far too much to process.
The amount of information available has exploded, but without any magical concomitant increase in our human abilities to process information and understand it. There has been no spontaneous appearance of widespread, high-quality education on how to separate signal from noise. Most important, our cultural commitment to establishing and protecting information quality has not grown much, as far as I can make out, never mind grown sufficiently to keep up with the growth of information quantity.
Greed Makes It Worse
All of this is worsened by greed. Late capitalism, particularly the American-style version, essentially maintains that the need for truth and trustworthiness must be a you problem, because it certainly isn’t a problem for capitalism. Capitalism makes a lot more money off of lies than it does truths and always has. The only fact that matters to the gloves-off, devil-take-the-hindmost version of capitalism the USA appears to have chosen as its suicide method is whether more money could be made.
What capitalism does understand about the need for meaning is that it it can be exploited as a market: people will pay money to try to solve the problem. Industry has given us AI for that very purpose. It’s doing very, very little (at least thus far) except perpetuating the problems that impelled its development while doing algorithmic jazz hands and demanding applause for existing at all.
If you don’t like it, and you still want something better or more, like say accuracy, or verifiability, or trustworthiness? What’s the matter with you? We made you this fancy gizmo, that ought to be good enough for anybody. Now you’re just being unreasonable. Neoliberalism loves nothing so much, and profits from nothing so cravenly, as convincing the individual to blame themselves for everything.
If confusion were the only unhappy consequence of the wholesale undermining of trust and the significant erosion of the idea of verification, that would still be enough to make it bad for us as human beings. The world is complex and risky. Constant confusion is dangerous. Dementia is a type of persistent constant confusion. There are reasons we live in wide-eyed terror of developing dementia.
Moral Injury
There are worse things than confusion, though. Damage to the dependability of meaning is a moral injury. Moral injury doesn’t mean being offended by something that you think is inappropriate or obscene or nasty, the kinds of things some people might describe as “immoral acts.” What moral injury signifies is an injury to one’s moral selfhood, one’s inward sense of right and wrong. If the cuts are deep enough, moral injury can destroy the ability to tell the difference.
Moral injury is a common experience among soldiers returned from war not only having witnessed atrocity and murder that are claimed to be right and just, but perhaps having also committed those atrocities. Moral injury is a common aspect of child abuse because the abusers categorically have all the power and therefore can, and do, insist that they are not only right to do what they do, but justified. The phenomenon called “survivor’s guilt” is an example of moral injury too. Our sense of what is right and wrong cannot always square the circle when we, seemingly arbitrarily, survive something another person close to us doesn’t.
Attacks on the very existence of truth itself, where verification is denied, where we are bombarded with contradictions and complexities for the explicit purpose of rendering us unable to effectively respond, create moral injury. When lies are used to provoke particular reactions from the public and both one’s reaction and one’s willingness to obediently accept the lie become proof of one’s loyalty, it creates moral injury. When we are bullied with the question, “who’re you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” it creates moral injury.
This isn’t an essay about the consequences of moral injury per se, so I will refrain from going too much deeper. But to understand part of how we got into our current handbasket and why it’s on fire, we have to acknowledge that one way people respond to moral injury is that they adjust their sense of right and wrong to accommodate the harm and make it okay. If that can happen, it feels a little like being rescued. If the injury isn’t really an injury, but something entirely reasonable and maybe even good, then you haven’t really been victimized or abused or harmed after all, and doesn’t that feel better? Never mind that the whole edifice is dodgy as hell and inherently rewards abusers: it can still stop you from psychically bleeding out.
Man’s Need for Meaning
Meaning is in our blood and we can survive a lot of things, but not bleeding to death. In Man’s Search for Meaning, concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl famously identified the need for meaning as the core human motivator: not pleasure, not the avoidance of pain, not reproduction, but the need for meaning.
Those who experience a crisis of meaning, who have the floor fall out from under their ability to comprehend the world, are going through what we might call epistemic crisis — epistemic is a convenient one-stop-shopping term for “knowledge and the ability to know things.” When this happens, some people double down on meaninglessness. Others fight like hell to find their way back to something that makes sense, something that gives meaning to the self and the world. Frankl’s book is a breathtakingly principled and humane product of that fight.
Other products of the same fight are neither principled or humane, and may not even hold up to logic. Sometimes the ideas that restabilize a person’s world are fundamentally flawed and can’t be maintained without a consistent and thorough denial or refusal of certain inconvenient aspects of reality.
It’s okay that I got hurt, we tell ourselves, entirely eliding the person or thing that hurt us as if the injury had just somehow happened totally at random from absolutely nowhere. It was probably for the best, we say, because regardless of whether there might’ve been much better possibilities, the thing that happened happened and we must make our experiences survivable somehow.
How Lies Become Truth
These lies become truths because they serve a real purpose. They do things. They have palpable, nameable effects and those effects might include helping us survive. When that’s true, even questioning these things can feel like a risk too big to take.
(Lies may also become the truth in other ways. Force and indoctrination, yes. But simple credulity, or the lack of ability or initiative to ask questions, will do the same job far more cheaply. For extra bonus points combine all these plus the moral injury, stir, and voila! It’s hard out there for someone who just wants to know whether they can trust the answer to a simple question like “how many people attended that campaign rally?”)
Lies thus become self-sustaining and, over time, infrastructural. You can’t pull that loose nail out of the doorframe, you idiot; the whole damn house will come down. Better to hammer it back in, and glue it for good measure. Truth? You can’t handle the truth.
But “you can’t handle the truth” is just another bullying lie. Truth is load-bearing, more so than lies can ever be simply because it has a firm foundation. But it takes effort, courage, and care to consistently and persistently present the truth. It takes work.
Making The Truth Irresistible
The late writer and genius truth-teller Audre Lorde once said, in response to poet June Jordan saying that her function was “to make revolution irresistible”: “Well OK, that is the function of us all, as creative artists: to make the truth irresistible.”
What this means to you and me as writers, and what it means to every reader too, is that solid research matters. It matters not just from the perspective of professional ethics or intellectual rigor. Solid research, verifiable facts, and an effort to present not just good information but reasoned and supported understandings of that information, are part of how we earn trust and make the truth irresistible.
This is moral work. It is ethical work. Because of these things, it’s inherently political work. The choice to do the work to be as sure you can be that you are presenting reliable information to other people is a statement of values and a statement of faith.
I did not plan to write this essay this way when I drafted the plan for this essay series. That, naturally, was also when I came up with the original title, the “Why Wikipedia Won’t Cut It” thing that now is the subtitle. I admit that I have not, consequently, written much about Wikipedia so far. I’m willing to go out on a limb, though, and say that I’ve gotten to some of the bones of “why you should raise your research standards.”
Why Wikipedia Won’t Cut It
You should, indeed, raise your research standards, and one of the ways you can do that is indeed to understand why Wikipedia won’t cut it. Wikipedia is an unreliable resource, broadly warned against and banned as a reference source by teachers, professors, editors, and publishers. It moves too quickly and changes too fast for productive consistency. It has too many authors and editors for meaningful quality control.
This is not to say that it’s a bad project. Quite the opposite, in fact: I admire the hell out of Wikipedia, one of the most consistent and principled attempts we’ve yet seen to create some sort of broad-based, inherently accessible, human-driven structure for collecting and presenting crowdsourced information. But the very factors that make Wikipedia what it is, including the laudable ease with which people can contribute, are exactly what make it unreliable.
Do not misconstrue what I am saying here. I’m quite aware that some of Wikipedia’s entries are everything you could want in a reference source. They are factual, well-referenced, reasonably thorough, provide high quality evidence, and the quality of their evidence stays stable over time.
Other Wikipedia entries don’t have any of these qualities.
That’s a problem. But it’s not the most important problem. The most important problem is that you can’t always tell the difference.
This isn’t a “you problem” or a user problem either: it’s part of the nature of the beast. The whole point of a reference work, or any other information-gathering tool such as a search engine, is that they are used to obtain information.
Reference works like encyclopedias (or Wikipedias) are used specifically to obtain overview-level essentials.
If one is in need of the basics on a topic, one is pretty damn unlikely to also and simultaneously already know enough about the topic to evaluate the worth of a source. You don’t know what you don’t know. When you don’t have enough to go on, you have no real way to know if a source is a splattered mess of half-truths and unconfirmed rumor, an orderly and appealing Potemkin village whose paint hasn’t yet started to peel, or something you can actually trust.
This is precisely why editors and fact-checkers and processes like peer review matter: other people have not only checked the information before it ever got to you, but checked each other checking it. It doesn’t eliminate all possibility of error or falsehood, but it sure does slim down the odds.
But we are creatures of convenience and habit and so we look things up on Wikipedia. And that’s not unreasonable. On the whole, it’s a smarter move than using AI, though this can also have limited use (and there is an upcoming entry in this series on the subject). Wikipedia can typically be trusted for the most generic of easily and widely confirmable basics: birth dates, death dates, locations on maps, a general sense of why something is noteworthy or relevant. Buckingham Palace is in London; Henry Kissinger is dead; Game of Thrones is noteworthy for violent intrigue and CGI dragons. Sometimes that’s all you need.
Know Where The Bones Are Buried… And Get The Receipt For The Shovel
But when you need more, and more to the point, when you know your readers need and deserve more, it is your job to get it and make sure that it is good and valid and accurate and verifiable. It is your job to do good research and take good notes, to keep careful track of where your information comes from, to be canny and discerning about the informational company you keep. It is your job to know where the bones are buried but also to know how to get your hands on the credit card receipt for the shovel.
The struggle for meaning has often, historically speaking, turned into a struggle over meaning. Meaning-making is a primal, existential power. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be worth anyone’s time to try to control such a difficult, protean thing. Our present cultural and epistemic moment is unique in some ways, but not in all. We humans have seen this before.
We have written our way through it before, too. As writers part of our job is to create words that are of benefit to people. The ability to know what is true, to be given trustworthy information and to be allowed to question or confirm it independently, benefits people. Undermining and attacking the ability to make meaning, whether with malice aforethought or out of pure mercenary expedience, causes injury. It is an injury that we writers can treat and perhaps even heal, though, if we care enough to do the work of making the truth irresistible.
The part you didn’t intend to write practically made me weep, it’s so deep and brilliant.
Thank you for this!