Wikiality
My students know that I have very mixed feelings about Wikipedia. On the one hand, it can be invaluable for quickly obtaining or checking uncontested facts about names, dates, locations, and sequences of events. It can also be a useful starting point for research; it often provides a serviceable orientation to a topic and can point you to some useful sources. Even so, Wikipedia can be desperately unreliable and biased when it comes to controversial issues and even some matters that shouldn’t be controversial. (I have a folder on my computer named ‘Wikidpedia’ where I collect particularly egregious examples.) It’s well known that the ‘community’ of Wikipedia editors is ideologically skewed compared to the general population, such that some topics simply cannot be represented in a balanced and responsible fashion (see here for one embarrassing example).
Anyway, I recently came across an almost laughable case of Bad Wikipedia. For reasons I don’t remember now, I found myself consulting the entry on ‘Reality’ (insert your own punchline here). Here’s how the article began:
Reality is all of physical existence, as opposed to that which is merely imaginary. It is the name for all of physical existence, but the word is also used in a declension to speak of parts of reality that include the cognitive idea of an individual “reality” (i.e. psychology), to a “situational reality,” or a “fictional reality.”
The term is also used to refer to the ontological status of things, indicating their existence, but this is simply the idea of giving names to smaller “realities,” and seems vague and academic without the idea of physical existence as the first “reality,” and the others being smaller parts.
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