Sunnydale is located on a "Hellmouth"; a portal "between this reality and the next", and convergence point of mystical energies...Now:
Hogsmeade is the only settlement in Britain inhabited solely by magical beings, and is located to the north-west of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry....
Archenland is a nation to the south of Narnia. Its borders are formed by mountains to the north and by the River Winding Arrow to the south...
Sunnydale, California, is the fictional setting for the U.S. television drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Series creator Joss Whedon conceived the town as a representation of a generic California city...It used to be common practice to enter fictional locations into Wikipedia with the same style, tone, and attention to detail as any non-fictional location. Parallel universes were presented parallel to each other, through a medium governed by consensus; no one objected to this free play of fact and fiction -- in fact, it made a pretty great read; only the extremely stupid, surely, were confused about whether Terabithia really existed.
Hogsmeade is a fictional village in the Harry Potter series of novels by J. K. Rowling...
In C. S. Lewis's fantasy novels the Chronicles of Narnia, Archenland is a nation to the south of Narnia. Its borders are formed...
But Wikipedia must keep up appearances. (For whom? I thought the thing was supposed to be for us, by us?) The Wikipedia: Manual of Style alerts are legion, and this one is still up on most of the sites quoted above:
This book-related article or section describes an aspect of the book in a primarily in-universe style. Please rewrite this article to explain the fiction more clearly and provide non-fictional perspective.Follow the links. There are guidelines indeed.
The latest surge in Wikipedia's oxymoronic campaign for academic authority is not only doing damage to how research is taught and understood, but to the very idea of the Wikipedia project. At best, it produces little sound bites of backward thinking from its competitors -- see the 7 December BBC article "Students 'should use' Wikipedia" [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7130325.stm] for the full story:
Ian Allgar of Encyclopaedia Britannica maintains that, with 239 years of history and rigorous fact-checking procedures, Britannica should remain a leader in authoritative, politically-neutral information.
Good old politically neutral information. Hey, remember in the late eighties when we realized that the notion of neutral information is illusory, and often a tool of manipulation? Weren't internet-based media supposed to provide a way around that?
In the days of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Bede, Sir John Mandeville -- before guys like Ian Allgar invented truth -- encyclopedists produced compendia, chronicles; they built timelines and maps that conformed to their narratives (Jesus, Arthur, whoever) rather than empty gestures in the opposite direction.
Wikipedia once provided a frontier for the free play of information, for medieval-style historiography to grow again. This was never to the exclusion of modern academic rigor, but perhaps it rebelled a bit against the top-down control of truth, which internet-based media were supposed to help destabilize.
In its attempts to make information neutral, Wikipedia only neuters.
As we might expect from any campaign for neutral information (there have been countless such campaigns, though they never seem so neutral with hindsight), all traces of the fan-generated, playful entries are are being systematically obliterated, with no record kept. They preserved a cultural moment; they embodied material extremely important to the devotees that created them; they are being burned. As usual.
To the medievalist's eye, the fixes are still transparent in the cases of Hogsmeade, Sunnydale, Archenland, and others -- there is most often an obligatory opening sentence which ensures that "fictional" is the first word we see, but then the old article often goes on just as the superfan originally, delightfully, wrote it. But there are no Middle-Earth locations to visit on Wikipedia anymore. We must look where the censors don't think to in order to find the gems. After this:
Yoknapatawpha County is a fictional county created by American author William Faulkner as a setting for many of his novels. It is widely believed by scholars that Lafayette County, Mississippi is the basis for Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner would often refer to it as "my apocryphal county."We get the dear old original, in present tense, and pretty much unharmed except at the first ellipsis:
Yoknapatawpha county is located in northwestern Mississippi and its seat is the town of Jefferson... bounded on the north by the Tallahatchie River and on the south by the Yoknapatawpha River and has an area of 2,400 mi² (6,200 km²). Most of the eastern half (as well as a small part of the southwest corner) of the county is pine hill country. The word Yoknapatawpha is pronounced "Yok'na pa TAW pha." It is derived from two Chickasaw words—Yocona and petopha, meaning "split land."... Yoknapatawpha was the original name for the actual Yocona River, which runs through the southern part of Lafayette County, of which Oxford is the seat. The area was originally Chickasaw land...
5 comments:
Wittgenstein:... Think of the case of the Liar. It is very queer in a way that this should have puzzled anyone much more extraordinary than you might think... Because the thing works like this: if a man says 'I am lying' we say that it follows that he is not lying, from which it follows that he is lying and so on. Well, so what? You can go on like that until you are black in the face. Why not? It doesn't matter. ...it is just a useless language-game, and why should anyone be excited?
Turing: What puzzles one is that one usually uses a contradiction as a criterion for having done something wrong. But in this case one cannot find anything done wrong.
W: Yes and more: nothing has been done wrong, ... where will the harm come?
T: The real harm will not come in unless there is an application, in which a bridge may fall down or something of that sort.
W: ... The question is: Why are people afraid of contradictions? It is easy to understand why they should be afraid of contradictions, etc., outside mathematics. The question is: Why should they be afraid of contradictions inside mathematics? Turing says, 'Because something may go wrong with the application.' But nothing need go wrong. And if something does go wrong if the bridge breaks down then your mistake was of the kind of using a wrong natural law. ...
T: You cannot be confident about applying your calculus until you know that there are no hidden contradictions in it.
W: There seems to me an enormous mistake there. ... Suppose I convince Rhees of the paradox of the Liar, and he says, 'I lie, therefore I do not lie, therefore I lie and I do not lie, therefore we have a contradiction, therefore 2 x 2 = 369.' Well, we should not call this 'multiplication,' that is all...
T: Although you do not know that the bridge will fall if there are no contradictions, yet it is almost certain that if there are contradictions it will go wrong somewhere.
W: But nothing has ever gone wrong that way yet...
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Hey, remember in the late eighties when we realized that the notion of neutral information is illusory, and often a tool of manipulation? Weren't internet-based media supposed to provide a way around that?
Really? Who's this "we" you're talking about? I didn't learn that until I was told it by an academic authority sometime in the early 2000s. The internet has enabled a much more democratic competition for ownership of reality, but many people use the information they gather prima facie, and not as the subject of inquiries into the nature of same.
I don't want a bridge to fall down (or a social policy decision to be made) because "politically neutral information is illusory". Democratizing information is a valuable and noble goal. I agree that it's less entertaining to have to see the word "fictional" in front of a description of Hogsmeade. But what about in front of the description of a fictional event popularized in a historical novel? What if my sources for entries in the World War 2 article include The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? The Protocols are fictional, and an article that presents otherwise should be changed to reflect that.
Does this mean it's reasonable to screw with articles on something called "Buffy The Vampire Slayer"? Probably not. Still, is it so ridiculous that Wikipedia might have as its goal to strive towards being authoritative?
But what about in front of the description of a fictional event popularized in a historical novel? What if my sources for entries in the World War 2 article include The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? The Protocols are fictional, and an article that presents otherwise should be changed to reflect that.
Should it? If you are actually writing an article on World War 2, you really should be searching somewhere authoritative, because the act of publishing in an academic or mainstream journal works within a discourse founded on factual authority, as established and revised by a large -- but finite -- group of scholars.
Truth comes from consensus; authority is, in a way, a function of limiting that consensus in a particular way for a particular community. Authority is dependent on a community; communities can only be defined against those whom they exclude.
Wikipedia, by definition (or so we thought), cannot exclude -- cannot limit its community. Should it do so, it ceases to be Wikipedia; it becomes a watered-down Brittanica.
The whole "contradiction isn't such a bad thing": I agree, but I don't think it applies in this case.
Me:
The Protocols are fictional, and an article that presents otherwise should be changed to reflect that.
You:
Should it? If you are actually writing an article on World War 2, you really should be searching somewhere authoritative, because the act of publishing in an academic or mainstream journal works within a discourse founded on factual authority, as established and revised by a large -- but finite -- group of scholars.
I had meant, in particular, the Wikipedia article on World War 2.
Truth comes from consensus
I categorically reject this. A proposition being agreed upon by consensus may be well accepted, and decisions may be made upon it. That doesn't make it true. Attaining and representing truth may be difficult or impossible, but that does not negate its existence, or the degree to which a statement may approximate truth. Wikipedia, whatever it is, isn't the whole world's private website, where they can make arbitrary claims and claim subjective right to them. The community has a set of standards and guidelines to which it holds itself.
The sense in which contradiction occurs in the above is a somewhat formal one: If we agree on some definitions for ourselves, perhaps one will be "Truth comes from consensus", and a means of reasoning based on these definitions, we would like it to be the case that we cannot conclude mutually exclusive statements. We're extremely careful about this in mathematics, but even in this discourse, I think it's relevant. For instance, consider this argument:
"Truth comes from consensus, therefore, in the absence of consensus, nothing is true. Consensus does not occur instantaneously, therefore before there was a consensus that 'truth comes from consensus', it was not true that 'truth comes from consensus', which means that it was true that 'truth does not come from consensus', which means that a consensus on the original statement would not entail its truth, because we know that truth does not come from consensus."
Wittgenstein argues that this is just a language game; a neat trick I played using the rules of English. Turing argues that that's all well and good as long as this is idle blog chatter, but as soon as we actually *act* on our conclusions, it better be the case that our (valid) prediction "the bridge will stay up" not coexist with a different (valid) prediction "the bridge will fall down". People use Wikipedia to gather information. It's status as an anarchistic, inclusory institution where truth is constructed and reconstructed in the minds and edits of the collective discourse is a lovely one if one's goal is to write about the epistemological nature of Wikipedia. On the other hand, some people may *act* on information they get on Wikipedia, and there may be real, tangible or personal consequences (beyond writing a scholarly dubious paper) to doing so. My personal experience with people using Wikipedia is that they *want* it to be authoritative. I don't think it's reasonable to reject this aspect of Wikipedia.
On the other hand, some people may *act* on information they get on Wikipedia, and there may be real, tangible or personal consequences (beyond writing a scholarly dubious paper) to doing so. My personal experience with people using Wikipedia is that they *want* it to be authoritative. I don't think it's reasonable to reject this aspect of Wikipedia.
I had meant, in particular, the Wikipedia article on World War 2.
In a truly free Wikipedia, this is surely what would happen: the Protocols might find their way into the article, but the mass of WWII fans out there (forming a consensus group) would quickly edit it out. It would pop up again once in a while; it would ebb and flow. That would be nice.
Keep in mind, too, that the history of WWII, or any way, is a function of such consensus. Anyone who argues that the victor doesn't write history missed out on a couple of key lessons in grade school (for those of us, at least, who attended in the eighties).
Wikipedia, whatever it is, isn't the whole world's private website, where they can make arbitrary claims and claim subjective right to them. The community has a set of standards and guidelines to which it holds itself.
Yes the community holds itself. It is not held. Therein lies my whole point.
Again, the ebb and flow of information will thus naturally take shape. The truth that this approximates is far different from a top-down model.
I categorically reject this. A proposition being agreed upon by consensus may be well accepted, and decisions may be made upon it. That doesn't make it true. Attaining and representing truth may be difficult or impossible, but that does not negate its existence, or the degree to which a statement may approximate truth.
We may have to agree to disagree on this one. It's a philosophical issue that is massive, too massive for my current amount of available procrastination time.
That said, I haven't read much Wittgenstein, but suffice to say I don't think his work is accurately, fairly, or applicably reducible to a repeated "language-games are useless and don't matter." For one thing, to put my cards on the table for a moment, I, and I am not alone in this, believe that the notion of Truth/Real/Reality is an essentially linguistic construct and cannot extend beyond it without positing a universe already preshaped within an anthropocentric model. I find such a universe-view to be inherently flawed, and arrogant almost to the extreme of God-based religions.
Consensus does not occur instantaneously
I disagree with this given assumption, so I can't agree with the rest of the game. I also believe time to be a function of logic which is a function of truth which is a function of consensus, so we can't really work with a "before consensus" in the first place.
Oh, also, the answer to Turing's bridge issue, at least as applied here, comes in Spivak's concept of strategic idealism: when one accepts and consciously ignores an inherent and often extremely important core flaw (i.e. that whenever we try to empower the subaltern in South Asia, we replace their voices with our own) in the system of logic that governs whatever task they are trying to accomplish, in order to get something done (i.e. to do something about the disempowerment of lower classes in the area).
Spivak, a gadfly to the last, argues against that kind of strategic idealism: to her, it is better not to move than to move in a way that is inherently self-defeating, perhaps even hypocritical.
I don't agree, but it is worth noting that, well, bridges have to be built within some system of logic... and bridges do fall, and will continue to fall, in real-world application.
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