Wikipedia and Commander
What science can learn by long dead oceanographers and Wikipedia
There is much criticism on the internet referring to amateurs doing the work of professionals. Musicians and journalists without the proper training are lauded as geniuses to some, but are relegated to the sidelines upon serious inquiry. Wikipedia began as an open source platform that encouraged the amateurs to share information regarding a subject and remains so. The Encyclopedia Britannica was the undisputed champion of reference books. They employed a team of experts that published a text beyond reproach.
The problem is that it was not perfect, and there the printed pages sat. Nature magazine performed a study comparing the veracity of scientific entries between Britannica and Wikipedia, which began to shine a light on the power of Wikipedia. Britannica was found to have three discrepancies to Wikipedia’s four. A very slight difference. The crux being that by nature Wikipedia is a self-correcting machine. The average posting is updated several times and an MIT study found that the average obscenity placed in the Wiki text will be removed in under two minutes. Unlike encyclopedia text, Wikipedia is constantly in flux, constantly searching for more credibility.
The 2010′s will go down as the decade of sharing. Social networking has become a staple of culture like the internet, television, and radio before it. An entire generation has leveraged the power of collaboration. This is the idea of web 2.0. The lone expert may be outdated. The average eight year old football fan could predict the outcome of an NFL game just as well as the expert on T.V. The true insight can now be found in groups. James Surowieki’s 2004 book “The Wisdom of Crowds”. Here is a brief excerpt from a fitting source regarding this book, Wikipedia.
“The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton‘s surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox’s true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts)”.
The history of science is cloaked in secrecy and that tradition of guarding knowledge is still somewhat in effect today. Modern chemistry began as a mystical version of alchemy that elevated the power of it’s practitioners. Somewhere along the line science was injected by demanding that the alchemist replicate his magic. Once the veil is lifted and another party replicates the feat, the scientific method is born.
Even today cutting edge breakthroughs in academia are bottlenecked through the slow moving process of verification rather than the sharing of peers to replicate. Review processes are tedious, access to the work is costly, and the distribution of the knowledge is small. Web 2.0 has changed our culture, it is beginning to change our businesses, but it will drastically change the way we learn and assign credibility to information.
In 1675 Sir Isaac Newton said, ”If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. He recognized the power of the crowds before him. Almost 200 years later U.S. Navy Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury collected multi-disciplinary array of data from every ship he could get his hands on. His work The Physical Geography of the Seafundamentally changed the way ships sailed the ocean. He collected data that was counterintuitive to the greatest sailors of the day. This data collection was again an affront to traditional expertise. Many merchants were open to the idea, however, and were grateful for Maury and his team’s insights.
Science had come to the seas and it’s teacher was the social network of those that sailed the water’s prior. Over 150 years ago Maury had learned what many experts have still failed to learn today. Opening information is the only true scientific method. A lifetime of learning is at your fingertips. Maury himself said it best, ”Thus the young mariner instead of groping his way along until the lights of experience should come to him . . . would here find, at once, that he had already the experience of a thousand navigators to guide him”.
