The Internet's Dilemma of Truth ... The Scottish Wikipedia
Researchers have long criticized Wikipedia,
and its "group editing" mode of operation. It allows anyone to edit
articles, and this makes the free encyclopedia a double-edged sword. Assuming
good faith, then everything mentioned on Wikipedia is correct, and nothing
wrong with it. But this mentality is the mentality of the nineties that
witnessed the beginning of the spread of the Internet, then we thought that the
Internet was a place for the educated, the honest, oh how naive we were.
I am reminded of a sentence that appeared in
a famous cartoon by Peter Steiner in 1993. The New Yorker cartoon depicts two
dogs, one of whom sits in front of a computer screen and says to the other dog,
"When you are online, no one knows you are a dog."
I think this sentence was a mockery of the
deceptive internet phenomenon, which was the "phenomenon" of the
internet in the nineties and the beginning of the 2000s and how anyone can
claim a "opposite" of what they are on the Internet.
We can understand this sentence in a new
context that is appropriate for our current era, as the hubbub has increased
after the Internet was freed from the restrictions of desktop computers, and it
became accompanying you even while you are on the bathroom chair, and it seems
that we are living in the "post-truth" era because everything has
become subject to falsification and fabrication.
Let's go back to Wikipedia, why did I mention
it at the beginning of the article?
A popular reddit forum user discovered that
the Scottish version of Wikipedia, is edited and managed by someone "who
does not speak Scottish". During seven years this person wrote more than
23.00 articles in "distorted" English trying to emulate the Scottish
language, which has different grammar than English.
Perhaps what this person - who turned out to
be American - did his diligence with a love for Scottish culture and language,
but the damage caused by this work is much greater. According to the Scots,
these articles give a bad view of the language and show it as a distorted
version of English. You can imagine, dear reader, that the Arabic version of
Wikipedia is administered by people who love Arabic and lived among the Arabs,
but they do not know the language except for some words, and do not know its
rules, this is exactly what happened with the Scottish version of Wikipedia, a
whole culture represented and managed by a person who does not belong to her.
This news raised the ire of many people
(especially the Scots), and some called for the closure of the Scottish version
of Wikipedia, and some called for re-correcting the course by participating in
re-editing it, and this person was subjected to a lot of harassment via the
Internet - which is something expected - I do not know if There is an official
backlash from Wikipedia.
Imagine that one person ran a page that
represented the culture of a large group of people and did not belong to them?
Let me repeat it as "one person" ... as measured by the rest of the
encyclopedia ... and then the Internet.
There are additional problems that result
from such behavior. The Scottish Wikipedia will represent a very distorted data
sample from the original language, and the importance of this thing is in the
training of artificial intelligence. Where many researchers resort to Wikipedia
pages in various languages in order to train artificial intelligence to
translate words and understand language, but when the sample is
"corrupt" then you can imagine the disastrous result that will result
from it.
This story prompted me to think about “what
is truth” in the internet age. Until recently, the world believed definitively
that the Scottish Wikipedia represents the Scottish people, who number more
than 5 million, but it turns out that it is the industry of one person living in
the United States.
This story takes me to one of my constant
obsessions which is "Who will tell my story now?"
In an era when it is easy for anyone to
compose false information about you, many of us rely on platforms that are easy
to manipulate to represent our digital identity such as Twitter, Facebook,
LinkedIn. Perhaps the safest option at the present time is to have a personal
website that you run yourself, and this will introduce us into a new Byzantine
debate.?