Collaboration, Knowledge, and Truth

"The Hive," an article by Marshall Poe in the September 2006 edition of The Atlantic Monthly, examines the emergence of the online collaborative encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Among the intriguing statements made in the article is the following:

Wikipedia has the potential to be the greatest effort in collaborative knowledge gathering the world has ever known, and it may well be the greatest effort in voluntary collaboration of any kind. The English-language version alone has more than a million entries. It is consistently ranked among the most visited Web sites in the world. A quarter century ago it was inconceivable that a legion of unpaid, unorganized amateurs scattered about the globe could create anything of value, let alone what may one day be the most comprehensive repository of knowledge in human history. Back then we knew that people do not work for free; or if they do work for free, they do a poor job; and if they work for free in large numbers, the result is a muddle. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger knew all this when they began an online encyclopedia in 1999. Now, just seven years later, everyone knows different.

The article goes on to describe the genesis of the idea of Wikipedia, and its organic growth from a small site with a few entries to its current status as one of the first places people go on the web to find out "what something is." One noteworthy feature of the development of Wikipedia described in the article was the degree to which it was fraught with conflict and contention over what should be included and whose view of a particular subject should prevail, often with dueling contributors engaging in a cycle of repeatedly deleting and replacing each other's contributions.

It is also interesting to consider the collaborative approach to discerning truth that is promoted by Wikipedia. Poe writes:

The power of the community to decide, of course, asks us to reexamine what we mean when we say that something is “true.” We tend to think of truth as something that resides in the world. The fact that two plus two equals four is written in the stars—we merely discovered it. But Wikipedia suggests a different theory of truth. Just think about the way we learn what words mean. Generally speaking, we do so by listening to other people (our parents, first). Since we want to communicate with them (after all, they feed us), we use the words in the same way they do. Wikipedia says judgments of truth and falsehood work the same way. The community decides that two plus two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by consensus. Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five. The community isn’t likely to do such an absurd or useless thing, but it has the ability.

This statement calls to mind the need for a balance between the two sources of knowledge--science and religion--in the development of this very promising tool. Certainly the use of a collaborative process is integral to the discernment of truth, as exemplified in the concept of Bahá'í consultation, and the model of knowledge championed by Wikipedia seems to be a big step towards the global utilization of the power of this process. Yet it is worth considering the role of science in furthering knowledge, particularly in light of the following insights provided by 'Abdul-Bahá: "Science is an effulgence of the Sun of Reality, the power of investigating and discovering the verities of the universe. . . ." This seem to imply that there are certain verities or truths of the universe that objectively exist, and thus taking social consensus as the sole indicator of truth, as described in the quotation about Wikipedia above, could act as a hinderance to the pursuit of knowledge.

As for the role of religion, relying purely on social consensus--without reference to some ultimate Authority, some Standard of Truth--risks leading to a largely materialistic perception of reality, lacking the values and morals that knowledge should be put in service of. From One Common Faith:

Religion is religion, as science is science. The one discerns and articulates the values unfolding progressively through Divine revelation; the other is the instrumentality through which the human mind explores and is able to exert its influence ever more precisely over the phenomenal world. The one defines goals that serve the evolutionary process; the other assists in their attainment. Together, they constitute the dual knowledge system impelling the advance of civilization. Each is hailed by the Master as an "effulgence of the Sun of Truth."