Wikipedia? Urban Dictionary? Get U an Internet Whom Can Do BOTH!
I recently saw a snarky tweet pitting Wikipedia against Urban Dictionary, and I've been thinkin ever since.
Honestly, I'd never considered the two together-- I've always used them for completely different purposes, so why would I? But the longer I've thought about it, the more I've come to realize it's not at all an issue of one versus the other, but rather the fact that they're two parts of the same whole.
The False Dilemma of Difference
Sure, fans of either platform would have you believe there's ample reason to distrust the other, but I challenge you to come up with one criticism of either platform that isn't also true of the other in some way. Both show the strengths and flaws of their crowdsourced nature-- of course, you can find just about anything you could be looking for on either platform, but since anyone could have put it there, can you really trust it? Each platform has entire structures and communities dedicated to preserving character and quality, and yet each is still inevitably capable of being wrong.
And there are obvious ways in which they are substantially different-- one was founded as a joke site that's become a legitimate resource, and the other takes itself way too seriously for being so easy to change. One seeks an air of authority and respect, while the other couldn't care less, but CAN make you laugh about things you never would have thought about before. It's true that both are different tools, with different purposes, that have developed different communities as a result. But these differences are trivial compared to what the two share in common in the grand scheme of things.
Democratizing Information
I've always been obsessed with the Encyclopédie, and wished for a contemporary equivalent. Bursting onto the scene shortly before the French Revolution, the Encyclopédie boldly sought "to change the way people think" by interpreting all the world's knowledge into language and context that would be accessible to the general public. The Encyclopédie sourced widely from the people of the time, and is immortalized for its depiction of Enlightenment thought-- that is, some of the central ideas that some would say have shaped our world.
What's easily the most beautiful thing to me about the Encyclopédie is the role it played in democratizing information. You no longer had to listen to some lecture by some expert in order to learn about a subject; you could simply look it up in a book! And at the same time, you no longer had to be "The Expert" on a subject to participate in explaining and disseminating that subject-- you simply had to reach out to the team behind the book, and you were in! And of course there had been equivalent resources before this project, and certainly there were many ways in which it failed to achieve its mission, but that doesn't detract from the beauty of its politic, and all that it achieved by making the creation, transmission, and perception of information a little easier for everyone involved.
Bringing it all together: from the French Revolution to Today
It's obvious to me that despite their superficial differences, both Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia represent contemporary projects in the exact same vein as the Encyclopédie. Both burst onto the scene at a time of great transformation right at the turn of the century, when the internet and the technologies behind it were just beginning to reach mainstream saturation, and when people were thirsty for new sources of information in terms of what exists and what it all means. And both platforms have also been successful in creating new ways for people to create and share information, in addition for new ways to access and learn said information, and have reached a level of activity and audience the Encyclopédie never could have imagined.
Put away your strong feelings on authority and expertise for a moment and look at the beauty that we as a people have created-- two massive, open, public, and democratic resources that are undoubtedly changing the way we think. Imagine what it means to exist in a world where these resources are a given, rather than the world we've been in, where they're under construction, or the world we just left behind, where they didn't yet exist. And now imagine how we can take these tools (and all the nameless other projects like Steemit and Craigslist and more) to a place of even greater accessibility and impact.
What would that world look like, where the project of the Encyclopédaires met the world of the Web to truly change the way we think?