Wikipedia Won't Sell the Truth and That's Why They Hate It

The Quiet War Against Reality

Hi, I’m an existential imbecile named Max Murphy. Here on The Murphy Memos we explore the absurdity of existence.

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Wikipedia Logo.

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Last month, I achieved my lifelong dream of virality with this tragicomic shitpost:

It’s funny because it’s true in the worst, most civilization shattering way.

Our teachers, God bless them, thought if anyone could edit Wikipedia then it was just a matter of time before bad apples spoiled the bunch.

My social studies teacher posed a theoretical question that seemed to debunk the entire premise of Wikipedia itself: what if a KKK member edited MLK’s page?

Surely, there are examples of such vandalism you can point to. But by and large, they are exceptions to a rule that has remained impressively stable for longer than anyone cares to admit.

Wikipedia just works.

And it isn’t some magic woowoo. It isn’t beautifully written code or the efforts of any single individual. Wikipedia works because contributors don’t make money. That’s the point.

The truth is not for sale on Wikipedia.

You see, the second you introduce money, there’s an invisible incentive that takes over, the invisible hand poking and prodding your no no square.

A crude image probably pops into your head: a Mr. Burns-esque caricature tossing you a big bag of money to write that “2 + 2 really is 5, and anyone who disagrees is a woke communist libtard!!1!”

But that’s not how it works. Not really.

Money subtly nudges you toward pleasing the crowd. And it doesn’t make anyone evil or bad.

But when you create an incentive to compete in the attention economy… you can’t be surprised by an outcome that systematically rips your eyeballs out of your head.

Have you ever seen Gladiator? It’s loosely based on the life of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and notorious source for stoic self help buffoonery.

Skim the Wikipedia page for Marcus Aurelius. Then watch the movie. Note how, other than his name, these two things have virtually nothing to do with each other.

Why do you think that is?

If they made an accurate movie based on his life, it would be very, very boring. No one would watch it and the remaining film crew would be condemned to playing songs on the world’s smallest violin for the investors.

And that’s how reality is most of the time, you know? Boring. Painfully boring.

Reality is a lot more like the Wikipedia page for botany than whatever headlines you skim while doom scrolling on the toilet.

My shitpost received more than its fair share of shit: people arguing that Wikipedia has a “liberal bias.” But I noticed that the people who say this are never active contributors to Wikipedia. Never.

If you see something false or misleading you can change it. Find a source, make an edit, and you can fix whatever falsehood that’s living in your head rent free. You won’t get paid, but hey, Wikipedia got closer to reality.

But they never do that, do they?

The truth triggers them, so they sit on the sidelines bitching and moaning that Wikipedia doesn’t align with their algorithmically induced culture war psychosis.

These are the people Teddy was talking about when he said,

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Jimmy Wales, and Wikipedia’s countless contributors are in the arena, fighting to make truth available to anyone and everyone around the world, for free and without ads.

What have these “critics” ever done other than sit on the sidelines?

Wikipedia isn’t a capital T source of truth. Nothing is, really. But you know what Wikipedia is? Our most successful, long-standing attempt to maintain any god damn relationship with reality. An insanely useful resource for starting a research binge.

You can read the whole page. Then read all the sources. Then maybe even contribute.

Its a beautiful ecosystem where curiosity reigns uninhibited by the need to get internet clicks for pocket change.

It is beyond profit, beyond culture wars, beyond whatever algorithmic blood sport is trending on social media this week. Wikipedia is worth defending, and fighting for, and donating to.

Wikipedia is the last vestige of truth in a society that put reality itself up for sale.

And the reason it succeeds is the exact reason Knol–Google’s profit-driven clone–failed so miserably. Knol had a similar program to YouTube Adsense: the more views your contributions get, the more money you made.

What could possibly go wrong?

Instead of getting an accurate biography of Marcus Aurelius, you get Gladiator bastardized into a wall of text. You get the same sensationalist shit you see on Twitter or the front page of Reddit.

The difference is subtle at first, and glaringly obvious with time.

The truth is not for sale. It just isn’t. And it can never be. Anyone telling you otherwise is just selling you a beautiful curtain to cover reality.

They’re selling you a fantasy and convincing you that no, really, the thing you just so happen to already believe really is the truth, look the AI even said so!

On some level, even they understand that they are living in a fabricated facsimile. A hyper-engaging lie where a boring truth should be. As long as the AI hallucinates what they want to hear, they’ll even buy the Kool-Aid before drinking it.

As Jose Ortega Y Gasset reminded us,

“It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.”

Every “Wikipedia killer” fails. And will fail. They’re nothing more than scarecrows desperately struggling to frighten away a reality that cannot be reconciled with their worldview. And we already have social media for that.

It’s more important than ever to remember that reality is more than what you want it to be. And that, my dear friend, is why this was the greatest shit post of my entire shit posting career.

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