There was yet another Andrew Keen inspired article last week bemoaning the age of “wikiality” — an age of supposed gullibility of us internet sorts. It begins with shocking news — people are getting quotes wrong, and Web 2.0 is at fault:

Truth: Can You Handle It?
Better Yet: Do You Know It When You See It?
By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 27, 2008; Page M01
…

How many legs does a dog have, if you call the tail a leg? Four.
Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.

Abraham Lincoln *

[*Note: Lincoln never said this. He liked a similar, more long-winded anecdote about a cow, but the dog version? Nope. Still, the quote is credited to Abe on some 11,000 different Web pages, including quote resources Brainy Quote and World of Quotes.

Though not technically “true,” the quote makes a nice start to this article about truth, being topical and brief, so if we want to go with truth-by-consensus (very popular now), we can go ahead and just say that he said it.]

Hesse then explains the crisis:

Andrew Keen describes it as “the cult of the amateur” in his same-named book. Stephen Colbert called it “wikiality” — meaning, “a reality where, if enough people agree with a notion, it must be true.

Information specialists call it the death of information literacy.

What’s really amusing about the Hesse article is that her initial example – the Lincoln quote – is an example where the web was more correct — and the web could have shown her that. The web has well known conventions for dealing with authority and making truth more verifiable, and when these conventions are embraced rather than rejected, one gets better results.

Follow along while we compare what it takes to verify truth on the web, and what it takes the “old world”…

Score one for wiki-world

Hesse seems to be claiming that the web (and it’s tendency to magnify casual opinion over scholarship) was responsible for this quote being wrong. But was the quote actually wrong? That seemed an important point — and nothing in the article seemed to prove the “Brainy Quote” version false — nothing, that is, beyond her simple assertion.

I decided to use the web to find older, more authoritative references to the “false” quote. It was easy once I realized that I should include the phrase “said Lincoln” to filter out simple non-contextualized quotes, such as one finds in quote lists. In fact, once I figured that out, an extremely early instance was on the first page of results [Note: my posting this article appears to have altered that result set].  It appears in a work called Lincoln’s Own Stories published in 1912:

Once when a deputation visited him and urged emancipation before he was ready, he argued that he could not enforce it, and, to illustrate, asked them: “How many legs will a sheep have if you call the tail a leg?” They answered, “Five.” “You are mistaken,” said Lincoln, “for calling a tail a leg don’t make it so”; and that exhibited the fallacy of their position more than twenty syllogisms.

It took less than fifteen minutes to prove the Hesse article wrong: far from being an false product of the wild web, the quote has an extremely good provenance. There’s a small matter of it being a sheep mentioned, but it matches the “wiki” quotes far better than the “long-winded anecdote” about a cow that Hesse favors.

Incidentally, the web can even show you how the “sheep” may have become a “dog”: Christopher Morely uses the modified Lincoln quote in Parnassus on Wheels in 1917 citing a dog, Wikipedia shows us he was an editor of several editions of Bartlett’s Quotations, which probably explains why the quote appears in his editions of Bartlett’s in the dog variation (no full text online, but see cites here).

That doesn’t seem to me a problem of authority. And it certainly has nothing to do with Web 2.0.

Score zero for the world of “authority”

Then, I decided to try it the other way round — could I prove the Hesse version of the Lincoln quote was from an even more trustworthy source?

Here’s where it gets ridiculous — the article that is bemoaning that people simply believe what they read provides no source for their version of the quote. So whereas you, the reader of this blog, can click the link “Lincoln’s Own Stories” to verify my assertion, to verify something in traditional media requires launching a federal investigation.

To try to find the source for her quote, I took the fact that it involved a cow, and probably contained the core phrase “calling a tail a leg”. Google Web search turned up nothing of use. Google Scholar turned nothing up, neither did Google Book Search. Figuring the author probably read this in a book (or saw it in a documentary) I tried Amazon’s full text search. Bingo.

The keywords I had chosen occurred in the biography “Lincoln” by David Herbert Donald. But the book was not providing a useful context snippet to Amazon. So I went down to the library, and got the book out. I looked up “emancipation” in the index — far too many pages listed. Looked up cow, and of course found nothing. Ugh.

My lunch break was slipping away. In a moment of insight, I went to the terminal in the library and pulled up Amazon.com. I did “search inside the book” again. While the snippet didn’t appear, it gave me the page number: page 396. I turned to the page — Aha! There was the source of the Hesse version. It talked of a long-winded anecdote about a Western case involving a cow.

Which raises the question: why do the defenders of “truth” want to make it so hard to verify their sources?

(The answer, in case you haven’t guessed yet, is they aren’t defenders of truth. They are defenders of authority. And from Ancient Egypt on, authority was maintained by having exclusive access to information… )

I won’t belabor this much longer. The source of the quote in the Lincoln biography is an obscure quarterly from 1950, the nearest available copy of which is in Worcester, about an hour and a half away. I thought of getting the article through Interlibrary Loan, but realized from the title “A Conference with Abraham Lincoln: From the Diary of Nathan Brown” that even if I got the journal, the article relied on a diary that would not be accessible to me.

So the Hesse version appears based on a single, non-primary source which references a journal article the author didn’t read, and the journal article references a diary that neither the author of the WaPo article or the author of the biography has ever seen.

It’s a big circle of trust, none of it linkable. And yet the web people, who are insisting on verifiable, linked sources are somehow the intellectually sloppy ones.

A final check

Still, given my source was from 1912, and the unverifiable source was likely contemporary, I could only prove that the quote being bemoaned as a prodct of “wikiality” had a good history, and was more verifiable. I couldn’t prove that it was more likely. So I called in a favor. I used to be a programmer for the amazing Readex “Early American Newspapers” project, the project to create a searchable full text database of this nation’s periodicals from pre-revolutionary times until 1876. So I emailed a person I know that still programs there. I asked them if they could punch in “Lincoln” and “calling a tail a leg” into the product and send me back the first results.

Sixty seconds later I had my answer — Web: 1, Books: 0.

What Lincoln said to the party visiting him — well, it was reported in the Chicago Tribune at the time.

And it’s not a “long-winded anecdote about a cow”, but rather, it’s much closer to that quote that appears in all those crazy wikis.

Headline: Lincoln’s Own Construction of His Proclamation;
Article Type:News/Opinion
Paper: Macon Telegraph, published as Macon Daily Telegraph;
Date: 10-23-1862; Issue: 841; Page: [3];

LINCOLN’S OWN CONSTRUCTION OF HIS PROCLAMATION — A little while anterior to Lincoln’s interview with the clerical committee (says the Chicago Tribune) a couple of other abolition fanatics found their way to the President and pressed upon him the emancipation scheme, and this was his reply: “You remember the slave who asked his master — if I should call a sheep’s tail a leg, how many legs would it have? ’Five’ ’No, only four, for my calling a tail a leg would not make it so.”

(Incidentally, the Readex Collection of Early American Newspapers is the most exciting thing going on in historical databases today — if your institution doesn’t have a license to it, you’re not serious about American History. Go check it out…)

I realize this is a Macon paper (hardly an uninterested party) quoting the Chicago Tribune (as was the custom in early papers). But there are plenty of other hits from other papers in the list as well — I’m staying on the clear side of fair use here, but they are there to be discovered by any user of Readex.

Suffice it to say, however, that the quote, and Hesse’s problem with it, are far more telling than she anticipated.

The subtitle of her article asks if you’ll know truth “when you see it”.

It’s a good question, but Hesse has the battery wired backwards.

The answer, from any web literate scholar, is if you make it easy for me to check it, maybe I will know it when I see it. The web does that in spades, which allows us, ironically, to repair the errors that the Washington Post generates.

I get a wave of nostalgia when I read a John LeCarre novel. Not for the simplicity of Cold War politics or for spy novels written with a real sense of literary style, but for the physicality of the world George Smiley inhabits. Trying to figure out a particular thorny problem, he grabs a notebook, brings the rotary telephone over to the table, and between making a couple of phone calls, thinking a lot and writing a bit he comes to some conclusion.

I miss the quiet of years gone by, the unconnectedness, and when I read small passages like that a strange bit of longing for that world sweeps over me.

And while there is a certain nostalgia here, I can’t help but think there is something bigger too, that we have lost something important to society, something beyond the aethestic of a clean table, and scratchpad, and a rotary phone.

I remember one particular month in 1992, for example, that I was struggling with some difficult articles on linguistic style. I’d pound my head against some of the text, armed only with a few reference works on the table at Dunkin’ Donuts, and get as far as I could by positing possible interpretations and checking them against the text. And then I’d mark out what things I didn’t understand, pick out relevant articles in the endnotes, and make a note to photocopy them next time I was at the library.

Here’s the dated bit: by the time I got articles commenting on the original, I’d often find I disagreed with their analysis. I had had time to solidify my opinion before joining the conversation.

Business has had its related losses, some very early on. My father, an old DEC guy, once noted to me the difference that Excel had brought to the enterprise in the late 1980s. Before spreadsheets, he said, you’d spend a lot of time hashing out assumptions. You’d get them nailed down, and then you’d do the math. After Excel, he said, the temptation to play with assumptions until you got the result you wanted was too great.

I mean, if we bump this figure up by 0.12, and this one down by half a percent, we’re golden, right?

What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that all these things are connected, and we’re still trying to deal with them. No George Smiley, the CIA collects all internet traffic in America, and tries to data mine it, without so much as positing an assumption first. A kid reads Roman Jakobson, and is immediately exposed to other people’s summaries of the article he has just read, before he has fully parsed it himself — before he has a chance to disagree. An accountant fudges Excel inputs just enough that a projection becomes a positive indicator.

They are all tied together, and together they represent one of the problems of our age. When conversation or computing power is readily available we tend to jump to it very fast. But for those conversations and computations to be meaningful, we have to enter into them with a contribution of our own.

And that requires us to wait a bit.

What worries me about the modern world is not that amateurs are taking over. It’s that the amateurs might be so soaked in the conventional wisdom of a discipline from a very early point that they won’t bring those needed misreadings to the table that have always fueled progress in the past. That without the silence in between, the conversation will become less varied and meaningful.

Which turns, oddly, into an ode on blogs. For today I sit on my porch, unwired, typing on an AlphaSmart Neo and reading some documents I downloaded onto my Sony Reader. And while I’m sure I haven’t pulled together the most cogent argument (or linked as much as I might), it feels damn good.

So I wonder if it’s possible to move back after all, to think in wider and longer swaths again, but to still keep the connectivity. And I can’t help but think that the lowly blog, with it’s talent for doing conversation as a series of longer cross referenced articles is the perfect channel we currently have for such discourse.

Regardless, I think it’s worth it to continue talking about what a healthy community of discourse looks like, rather than to assume that future professional communities must borrow thier idiom from current teen or gadget-geek culture.

That is, perhaps we should have the discussion that Andrew Keen and Michael Gorman would start if they were not so interested in being inflammatory. One that notes that Marc Andreesen is trying to get offline more, and that Lessig declared email bankruptcy over three years ago.

There’s a real hunger right now for a work that pulls these New Primitive impulses developing among the older techies and reconciles it with the beauty of the data finds data world Jon Udell recently discussed on his blog.

In short, how do we structure our lives so that we get both the benefits of mass conversation and the restorative power of the silences in between?

Update: I just discovered that Martha Burtis asks perhaps the first important question, one which I skipped over here: How are we blogging now? What are our techniques, and what have we found works and doesn’t work? Much better starting point than my Smiley-induced ramble.

From there it becomes a question of a variety of best practices…but the first step is really to make visible our experience, like those old books on writing that would just be collections of reflections by writers on schedule, technique, process, etc. “I usually start typing at four in the morning on my Remington from notes made the previous afternoon,” said Writer X., etc….