49 Knowing through the Internet
In many ways, for many purposes, the internet provides the most accurate resources of information ever available to human beings. A case in point is Wikipedia. Let us first admit that many valid criticisms can be made of Wikipedia. On unpopular or relatively obscure topics, Wikipedia merely reproduces seriously dated publications that are in the public domain. On some topics, the presentation is shaped by amateurs with uninformed and peculiar points of view. Topics can be hijacked by political operatives. Information from more authoritative sources is not always accorded greater value. There is no systematic practice of fact-checking. Many of the entries read as if they were composed by disorganized committees of volunteers (which they are). And more criticisms can also be made; a long list of them, in fact, can be found in the Wikipedia entry entitled “Criticisms of Wikipedia.”
But despite these criticisms, and despite persistent injunctions of college professors against using Wikipedia as a source, it is without a doubt the greatest single source of knowledge ever assembled. The more responsible epistemic agent will always balance whatever is said on Wikipedia with a broader survey of other more authoritative sources, but for a quick and mostly accurate overview of the widest array of possible topics, no other encyclopedia even comes close. Even if Wikipedia is a second-rate (and sometimes third-rate) resource on each particular topic, there is no other base of knowledge that can come close to its range of coverage and general level of accuracy.
And, of course, Wikipedia is not the only available source of knowledge on the internet. The internet gives us access to first-rate scholarly journals, news media, blogs by true experts of obscure matters, maps, lectures, and so on without limit. The internet makes it easier than ever before to take a broad sampling of different accounts of nearly any topic, and to form judicious opinions based upon that diversity of resources.
But this is only, at best, half of the story. As recognized at the end of the previous section, internet searches can be “gamed,” and there are powerful incentives for distorting what users find as a result of their searches. This is shown most dramatically in instances of exploiting data voids.
As expansive and comprehensive as the internet is, there are topics that have a very minimal presence on the web. It may be a set of words that is not commonly used, or it may be a person or event or little town about which people have very little to say. We can call such a neglected entity a “data void,” which simply means that there is not much information on that particular topic on the internet. If, for whatever reason, someone wishes to tell some particular story about these data void entities, they can tell that story in multiple places throughout the web, and mindless algorithms will direct users to that story if they happen to search for that entity