The Invisible Library

Atheists and rationalists often lament about the increased influence that the dogmatic and religious have in this country and by extension, on the world’s political and social scene. We hear so much about religiosity and it’s discontents with modern civilization, that we think of it as a creeping force to be reckoned with, something to remain ever vigilant against, lest we be dragged kicking and screaming back to the Dark Ages. But a recent report by Gregory Paul & Phil Zuckerman says otherwise.

Their study looked at a number of factors and found that far from the popular claims of a Western World in the grips of a religious rebirth, we are in fact becoming far more secular, faster. And by we, I mean the entire human species, not just the US. The only disappointing news in the whole piece is that the US is moving slower in this regards than everyone else, including China and even Turkey (where one third of the population say that religion is not all that important in their daily life, compared with just over one half here in the US). But just because we’re a little behind in the race to a rational, secular world, it doesn’t mean we aren’t getting there, and faster than the Dominionists would have you believe [emphasis mine]:

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Not satisfied with mangling facts and figures about Google, Information Retrieval Systems or the Internet in general, in his latest rant, Michael Gorman sets his sights on the big fish: Wikipedia. It’s really always been about Wikipedia for him. Trashing Google, bloggers, and Burst Culture is just a side project. He’s really pissed off about Wikipedia and what it does to authoritative credibility in general but his in particular. As his posts have been hosted thus far by the Britannica Blog, that’s no real surprise, seeing as how they’re primary competition comes form Wikipedia:

All the central institutions of Western society have responded in a similarly reactive and alarmed manner. Many of these institutions are driven by the middle aged and old acting in a domain that is widely perceived to be the province of the young. This discontinuity is not helped by reliance on a series of urban myths about the supposed uniqueness of the young generation based on the idea that its members have no useful memory of the pre-Web life. Let us leave aside the fact that the “uniqueness of the young” has been proclaimed every 15 years or so for almost the past century—from the energetic flappers of the1920s to the lethargic slackers of the 1990s.

He’s finally become that stereotypical cranky old man, ranting about young people on his lawn. And flappers. I’m not going to parse the rest of his two part rumination on why Wikipedia, and by extension the whole entire Web, sucks. And flappers. It’s more of what we’ve already seen: over simplifications, generalizations and straw men of unusual size.

Wikipedia works. This isn’t just a fan speaking, or some dirty webified Youtubian. I did graduate work on Wikipedia and found that it works pretty well, applying the peer-review concept on a larger scale. An article published in Nature two years ago reached the same conclusion: Wikipedia is just as good as Britannica in most places, better in some but could use a little more attention paid to the more complex, technical articles, a fact that Wikipedians have mentioned and addressed frequently. And, as we say on the Web, it’s just as easy to fix Wikipedia as it is to bitch about what’s wrong with it. But of course, Wikipedia won’t cut Gorman a check for his work, so why bother? No pay, no play for our Serious Academic.