Editing reality

I caught the first fifteen minutes of Radio 4's Start The Week before leaving the house. Andrew Dalby was on, promoting his book The World and Wikipedia: How We Are Editing Reality. It was actually Amanda Goodall, author of Socrates in the Boardroom, who made the most interesting comment. I paraphrase from my hastily scribbled note:

... we feel guilty about using it, and nobody 'fesses up to using it, perhaps because we feel it doesn't have any legitimacy -- because it doesn't look like it has any legitimacy. Perhaps it's time to introduce, say, a small fee for use, to introduce some legitimacy.

Of course. That's exactly the problem with the "free" model that the internet -- by cutting materials costs to nearly nothing -- makes possible. Because you're not paying, directly and openly, for a product or service or content, it doesn't look legitimate.

It's the same dilemma that we had with walks in the park. These are clearly illegitimate as forms of exercise or leisure, and so we rightly built (on those parks, appropriately) gyms, which, by charging just a small monthly fee, made walking legitimate. Or free education. I am unfortunate enough to be amongst those who spent several years studying for a worthless sheet of paper from an illegitimate "back-street" university. This government deserves great praise for bringing the back-street universities into the mainstream by allowing them to charge students a small fee for their use. And what is the oldest profession but the welcome legitimisation of an act that, without the direct and open exchange of a small fee, just doesn't feel legitimate?

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Goodall was not alone in providing refreshing insight into the Wikipedia "problem". Social media expert (got that? social media expert. I bet the BBC blurb writer copied that right out of his twitter profile. I know, twitter, right?) Evgeny Morozov had this additional suggestion to help Wikipedia to gain legitimacy:

It's time for Wikipedia to get an editorial board, because all newspapers have editorial boards, so why shouldn't Wikipedia?

Yes! Newspapers are exactly the great model of success in reliability and verifiability and legitimacy that we should be replicating. Certainly they would not, say, let a self-declared "expert" go around making the embarrassing comments of a novice in the field. You wouldn't find newspapers editing reality.