[Foundation-l] Umberto Eco's interview

Sun Aug 29 14:03:39 UTC 2010

Thank for the interview, very interesting. However, Eco is not uncritical about Wikipedia.

"The computer in general, and the Internet in particular, is good for the rich and bad for the poor. That is, Wikipedia is good for me, because I am able to find the information I need; I do not trust it, because everyone knows that as Wikipedia grows, the errors also grow. I found steep follies written about me, and if no-one had pointed me to them, they would be there still."

" look at the Italian Wikipedia; I'm not sure that the news is correct, so I go to check the English version, then yet another source, and if all three tell me that this gentleman died in 371 AD, then I begin to believe it." - Indeed! If he went to look for the birthdate of Duns Scotus when until quite recently he would have found at least three different dates. But at least he is an expert on Duns Scotus.

"Wikipedia, like the whole Internet, has the problem of filtering the news. It keeps both false and real news; but the rich know filtering techniques at least for the areas they know how to check. If I have to do a search on Plato, I have no problem immediately identifying the sites written by madmen, but if I am researching stem cells it's not certain that I can identify the wrong sites."

"I noticed that in a certain period of Berlusconi's triumph people went looking for information about me in right-wing books and placed it in Wikipedia: as propriety prevents me from changing it directly, I left it. But obviously it was an entry made by the winners of the moment.

Collective control is therefore useful up to a certain point: it is conceivable that if one gives a false length of the equator, sooner or later someone will come along and fix it, but correction of more subtle and difficult issues is more complicated And it seems to me that the internal control is minimal, that is, it cannot control the millions of new changes flowing in. At most, it can check if a madman wrote that Napoleon is a racehorse, but there's not too much it can do."

"But I keep saying that I am increasingly exposed to the risk of my inability to filter the news. Lately I started writing down some false information, some errors that one can find in Wikipedia. In the same article, for example, there were two contradictory reports, a sign that there had been an amalgam."

Peter