Tonight I went to see historian Timothy Garton Ash talk with his friend Tobias Wolff at Stanford. The occasion was the publication of Timothy’s newest book, a collection of essays and reportage loosely built around the idea that “facts are subversive.” Timothy’s premise seems to be –roughly, loosely– that people in power are often trying to construct narratives in support of a particular economic, political or culture agenda, and that facts –even very small ones– can sometimes trip that up.
One thing they talked about was about honesty in memoirs — for example, Mary McCarthy’s 1957 autobiography Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, in which McCarthy disarmingly confesses that “the temptation to invent has been very strong,” and “there are cases when I am not sure myself whether I am making something up.” And about George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, in which Orwell wrote:
“I have tried to write objectively about the Barcelona fighting, though, obviously, no one can be completely objective on a question of this kind. One is practically obliged to take sides, and it must be clear enough which side I am on. Again, I must inevitably have made mistakes of fact, not only here but in other parts of this narrative. It is very difficult to write accurately about the Spanish war, because of the lack of non-propagandist documents. I warn everyone against my bias, and I warn everyone against my mistakes. Still, I have done my best to be honest.” (1)
This brought into focus for me something I’ve long half-recognized — both in my own experiences of reading Wikipedia, and the stories people tell me about how they use it themselves. Article after article after article on Wikipedia is studded with warnings to the reader. “This article needs references that appear in reliable third-party sources.” “This article needs attention from an expert on the subject.” “This article may be too technical for most readers to understand.” On this page, you can see 24 common warning notices — and there are many, many more.
And I think that’s one of the reasons people trust Wikipedia, and why some feel such fondness for it. Wikipedia contains mistakes and vandalism: it is sometimes wrong. But people know they can trust it not to be aiming to manipulate them — to sell them something, either a product or a position. Wikipedia is just aiming to tell people the truth, and it’s refreshingly honest about its own limitations.
Tobias Wolff said tonight that sometimes such disclaimers are used manipulatively, as corroborating detail to add versimilitude to text that might otherwise be unpersuasive. I think that’s true. But in the case of Wikipedia, which is written by multitudes, disclaimers are added to pages by honest editors who are trying to help. They may not themselves be able to fix an article, but at the very least, they want to help readers know what they’re getting into. I like that.
(1) I looked that up on Google Books when I got home. Yay, Google Books!
Sue Gardner's Blog 
The most subversive facts are those which someone is trying to subvert. But the truth comes out; it always does. And when it does, the facts themselves tend to subvert those who were trying to suppress them, but not nearly as much as those who were trying to uphold the facts in the first place would prefer.
Wikipedia’s guideline against manipulative versimilitude is for some reason the only guideline or policy illustrated with cartoon animals. The only other guideline or policy that even comes close is WP:DONTBITE.
for me wikipedia is a great tool to aproach knowledge. not the only one tool for knowledge just one more. thanks again to wikipedia.
Clearly more core policies should be illustrated with cartoon animals. The other reason for people to trust WP is that we are up-front about not claiming to be the final word in quality. We don’t trumpet that we are ‘fair’ or ‘balanced’ or ‘your trusted source in’ anything.
And we always run the risk as we grow of starting to say the opposite, of becoming too fond of our millions of articles and thousands of bits of featured content, and starting to say “we are the biggest” or “we are the best” in some area. Which isn’t the point of the endeavour, and (somewhat counterintuitively, as you note) makes people more wary of Wikipedia, less willing to trust us, more concerned about the negative impact of any single source acquiring a monopoly on public attention.
I much prefer it when we take advantage of our popularity to emphasize that we provide links to, and context for, all important sources about a topic… rather than focusing on our summaries of it. [This applies mainly to Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikispecies, Wikiversity, and Wikinews. for Wikisource, Wikiquote, and Wikibooks, it would be nice to have the best interface and reading tools for these primary-source materials; there we can indeed aspire to be the best around.]
I hope we get http://microformats.org/wiki/gift self study assessment content and the infrastructure necessary to reasonably maintain it before we get any more cartoon animals. There are plenty of open and free textbooks, but very few with the kind of self study assessment content which allows for study material recommendations. SJ, I hope you will please tell this to the “Books in Browsers” people who I know you are seeing on Thursday and Friday. I hope to see you over the weekend at the OLPCSF.org meetings.