The revolution will not be verified.

Wired posted an article yesterday highlighting Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wale’s call for authors to "put more emphasis on quality, not quantity". This comes right on the heels of Monday night’s "The Wørd", a daily segment on Comedy Central’s Daily Show spin-off, "The Colbert Report". This edition of the Wørd showcased "Wikiality", christened by the show’s host and namesake Stephen Colbert as an apt companion for his favorite linguistic abomination—coincidentally the first Wørd to be aired on the show—"truthiness". Click here or the screen-shot to watch the "Wikiality" segment on YouTube. Now, Stephen Colbert says he thinks of the character he portrays on The Report as a "well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot". The whole premise of the show being that Colbert reports what he feels to be true and what he feels should be news---all part of being a truly patriotic, often jingoistic, supporter of President Bush. I disagree with Mike’s post over at techdirt.com that Colbert is trying to one-up "The Daily Show"'s popularity over the Net Neutrality debate. Instead, I think this ties in quite nicely. (You'll notice that both Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart are executive producers of The Report.) I mean, if we had regulatory practices imposed as to how we are able to interact with/access/use the Internet, we couldn't have this kind of fun! Seriously, though, this is the point: the Internet exists because it is outside of the jurisdiction of large companies and governmental control, mostly (I would like to see this debate be a unified and global one, prompting action in the handful of countries regulating their citizens’ access to the Internet). [Say, you passed it: be sure to check out the Web's reoccurring favorites like the awesome Tron-guy, the Backstreet-Boys-singing Chinese duo and the Sponge Monkeys from rathergood.com in the music video, "We Are The Web", on savetheinternet.com.] Back to Wikipedia on our smaller, national scale. The interesting part about all of this is that Colbert realizes he has a rather impressionable fan base. He merely suggests tweaking the Wikipedia entry for African elephants to read that their population has tripled in size, and Wikipedia was flooded by Colbert-watching "vandals". In response, Wikipedia locked down almost every entry tied to Stephen and the Report, as well as entries on elephants, African elephants, Oregon (Stephen begins all his Wikipedia talk by comments of Oregon being "California's Canada", "Washington's Mexico" and/or "Idaho's Portugal"), truthiness and they even locked the user account, StephenColbert. Speaking of Washington, Colbert also quips that if he wants to believe George Washington didn’t have slaves that it’s his “right” to believe such a thing. And that's the beauty of it: all he has to do is log on to Wikipedia to make it fact. The following evening, Colbert responded to the lock-down with a segment in which he "opened" the phone lines to answer "viewers' calls" (per usual, all staged). This second video (click here or the image to follow the link to YouTube) shows the dialogue between Stephen and an unhappy caller that first alerted me to the locking of certain Wikipedia entries. What a frenzy! It’s certainly not one of my favorite Wørds, but I appreciate that it pointed out Wikipedia’s complete malleability. That, and how you certainly need to take all of its entries with a grain of salt. Or perhaps a rim of salt. Let’s just say a nice, Virginia cured ham with a warm, honey glaze. It also reminded me of an insurance “beginner’s school” conference I attended a few months ago where the first speaker asked us all to brainstorm about just what, exactly, we think insurance is. After having us contribute some of our thoughts, ideas and feelings on insurance, she began her lecture: "According to Wikipedia, insurance is. . . ." I was shocked. Each of our companies forked over somewhere on the order of $1,000 for each of us to attend (tuition + airfare + hotel) and one of the main reference sources for the program was Wikipedia?! Amazing. At its best, I do think Wikipedia is a great melding of presumed fact and I honestly feel that most people moved to contribute knowledge to this Internet encyclopedia do so because they want to contribute correct, objective information. This is very easily muddled, however—perhaps because of the overwhelming influence of our gut, or intuition (read: personal bias). Having spent about seven months of my life in Micronesia, about two months in the Federated States of Micronesia and about five months in the Republic of Palau, I stumbled upon some Wiki entries about this region and was stunned to find that someone had described the people of these island nations as "immoral" and that the countries were "writhing" with uncivilized peoples. (Yes, "writhing", not "rife".) I quickly edited those entries, deleted the biased accounts and added some (of what I thought were) interesting tidbits of my own. Wow, checking back in on those entries just now, I see a lot of it has been updated with much more information, some of which I had come across at some point during my short stint with the research library at the Belau National Museum. So, even as much as I have perused Wikipedia and learned a thing or two, thank you, Stephen Colbert. Though Wikipedia’s community aspect has been a hopeful check to keep everyone honest, thanks for reminding us that people are also easily influenced, especially for a laugh.