Wikipedia is frequently snubbed for its anonymous, user-edited content. The argument is this: you don’t know who’s writing the articles you are reading, so you cannot trust them. This is offered in direct contrast to institutional sources like textbooks, academic journals, and proprietary encyclopedias.

What I find interesting about this discussion is the ommission of the seemingly obvious question: why should we trust institutional sources?

The answer is that great myth of modernism: the fair and just society. We take for granted that democracy and reason have produced a good society, so we take for granted that we can trust information presented to us through its institutional channels.

But we can’t, because humans are fallible and always will be. Committees can’t stop every bad idea, review boards can’t weed out every factual inaccuracy, and editors can’t correct every grammatical error. Reason and democracy won’t prevent all wrongdoing. Humans are corruptable and always will be. Leaders lie, corporations cheat, and individuals look the other way.

If we abandon this notion of the fair and just society, we see that all processes by which information is brought to us are complicated and subject to judgment errors, mistakes, and corruption. We never have had reliable information that did not require us to approach it with skepticism. Textbooks are dangerous because they parade objectivity. Wikipedia, on the other hand, admits its own fallibility, thereby inviting critical thinking and making it all the more trustworthy–and all the more compatible with the postmodern condition and the failure of the myth.

***

Wikipedia is also a great example of the vernacular–local resources used to meet local needs.