December 12, 2006
In Defense of Wikipedia Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:40 AM EST Yesterday I taught Renoir’s The Grand Illusion, still thought to be one of the greatest films ever made. I was uncertain about what my students would make of it, since some current undergraduates are put off by subtitles, and for that matter by black-and-white films. Film courses taught by people with doctorates in the field have largely replaced student-run film societies, and that, combined with the VCR and DVD having killed off revival houses, means that fewer current undergraduates have a sense of the films they “ought” to have seen. They certainly have less deference toward what I was taught to revere as the film canon. I was fairly certain my students would be able to make some sense of the thing—they were watching it as the capstone to a course on the First World War—but I did not expect that too many of them would have ever heard of Jean Renoir, or know much in advance about a movie I had been taught, by student film buffs, to revere.
Big mistake. Some knew as much as I would have known almost 40 years ago, and others knew more. They knew more because they’d Googled the film and its director. They were admirably cautious about the accuracy about what they had found—they realize that Wikipedia can be unreliable—but in this case their fears seemed groundless, and in any case they had also looked up scholarly articles in databases to which the college subscribes.
This made me think a bit. I own three or four books on Renoir because almost 20 years ago I agreed to talk to a student film society about The Grand Illusion, and I did not want to embarrass myself. I bought the books and read them; I hadn’t had time to go the library. A generation ago, there was no other way to find out too much about anything, unless you happened to know an expert in the field, which usually meant you had a job working in a university. There was always the Britannica, but if you needed more, you went to a university library; if you were short of time and extravagant, and lived in a large city or a college town, you went to a bookstore, and shelled out. If you did not have access to the university library or the college bookstore, you were out of luck. As for yet more specialized knowledge, a lot of scholarly articles were inaccessible unless you attended a fairly rich university. The Internet has changed this to a degree that has still not quite sunk in for me.
The now traditional complaint about Internet research is that there is no gatekeeper—no board of credentialed editors—so there is too much garbage on the Net and no way to know what any assertion or interpretation is worth. But that’s a tricky one. Yesterday, wasting 20 minutes in my office, I read e-mails on an alternate history e-list to which I subscribe following a debate about Churchill’s decisions in 1940 and 1941. A number of the contributors, none of them, as far as I know, professional historians, were quoting John Charmley, a professional historian, and in my opinion an ominously biased interpreter of the questions being discussed. But Charmley has a university job, and has published a dozen books, which means he is well past the gatekeepers. Wikipedia on Renoir sounded less polemical, and less dangerous to use, without a degree in the field. More importantly, you do not have to be anywhere special to use it. It fills in the background no one is nowadays imagined to have. My students were reminded of something I had said in passing several months before, that Norman Angell had published, in 1913, The Great Illusion, deprecating the chances of anything like the First World War ever happening. Most of the time, pop futurists writing columns and pseudo-books tell you that the world is changing profoundly and for the better, very fast, and that some gizmo or piece of software is doing it. They are generally wrong. But not always.
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