REVIEWS
The theme of identity recurs. An astronaut believed dead is resurrected—he’s a
copy, of course—and Michaelmas, too,
meets a replica of himself. Four features
distinguish Michaelmas. First, it is the most
polished example of Budrys’s craft: the
language is highly literary—striking metaphors and similes abound—and the narrative voice swoops imperceptibly from third
person past to first person present; wonderful characters—an Ossetian cosmonaut,
an aging newsman, a Turkish limousine
chauffeur, and many others—are painted
in quick, deft strokes; and the plot gallops
across a single, eventful day and three continents. Second, there’s Michaelmas himself:
absolute power corrupts absolutely, in Lord
Acton’s phrase, and great men are nearly
always bad men; yet Michaelmas is secretly
a great man who remains benevolent and
uncorrupted. Third, there’s the persistent
underlying note of melancholy: mourning
his decades-dead wife, Michaelmas has
no affectionate relationships other than
the one with his creation, Domino; and
our universe, it turns out, is just a fluke of
information theory, tuned into existence by
beings who themselves may be only drifting particles elsewhere in the multiverse.
Finally, there’s the fact that Michaelmas
depicts a near future that’s now an alternative version of our immediate past. In many
ways, it’s a more attractive world, with a
U.N. manned mission to the solar system’s
outer planets and less terrorism, war, and
crime. In a similar way, it could be argued,
Budrys’s science fiction presents an alternative version of the genre—a promise of
better possibilities that were never quite
realized. Indeed, the bulk of Budrys’s writing
was published a half-century ago and isn’t
in print, though it’s easily obtainable from
online booksellers or brick-and-mortar
secondhand stores. You should make the
effort. This is what science fiction can be
but hardly ever is.
MARK WILLIAMS IS A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR TO
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW.
COLLABORATION
Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth
WHY THE ONLINE ENCYCLOPEDIA’S EPISTEMOLOGY SHOULD WORRY
THOSE WHO CARE ABOUT TRADITIONAL NOTIONS OF ACCURACY.
By SIMSON L. GARFINKEL
With little notice from the outside world,
the community-written encyclopedia Wikipedia has redefined the commonly
accepted use of the word “truth.”
Why should we care? Because Wikipedia’s
articles are the first- or second-ranked results
for most Internet searches. Type “iron” into
Google, and Wikipedia’s article on the element is the top-ranked result; its article on
the Iron Cross is also first. Google’s search
algorithms rank a story in part by how many
times it has been linked to; people are linking to Wikipedia articles a lot.
This means that the content of these
articles really matters. Wikipedia’s standards
of inclusion—what’s in and what’s not—affect
the work of journalists, who routinely read
Wikipedia articles and then repeat the wiki-claims as “background” without bothering
to cite them. These standards affect students, whose research on many topics starts
(and often ends) with Wikipedia. And since
I used Wikipedia to research large parts of
this article, these standards are affecting
you, dear reader, at this very moment.
Many people, especially academic experts,
have argued that Wikipedia’s articles can’t
be trusted, because they are written and
edited by volunteers who have never been
vetted. Nevertheless, studies have found
that the articles are remarkably accurate.
The reason is that Wikipedia’s community
of more than seven million registered users
has organically evolved a set of policies and
procedures for removing untruths. This
also explains Wikipedia’s explosive growth:
if the stuff in Wikipedia didn’t seem “true
enough” to most readers, they wouldn’t keep
coming back to the website.
These policies have become the social
contract for Wikipedia’s army of apparently insomniac volunteers. Thanks to them,
incorrect information generally disappears
quite quickly.
So how do the Wikipedians decide what’s
true and what’s not? On what is their epistemology based?
Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn’t based on principles
such as consistency or observability. It’s
not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a
radically different set of epistemological
standards—standards that aren’t especially
