« I missed Blogging Day! | Home | the military-industrial complex employs your kids »
Sprachgefuhl
By audhill | September 8, 2007
Reading David Warlick today pondering the use of Wikipedia as a source of information for a piece he’s writing, it occurred to me that the English language obliquely suggests the ambivalence that he feels regarding it’s usage.
I want to use the Wikipedia! And, I don’t want to use the Wikipedia! My reasons for wanting to avoid using the Wikipedia as a source for my reference are obvious. Much of this online community encyclopedia is undocumented, including this article. The Wikipedia, from many perspectives, is a social network (this article has been worked by 11 editors). And, to many of the readers of my work, the Wikipedia is automatically suspect.
The use of the article the in front of Wikipedia versus omission of that article seemed to me just then to speak to the question of Wikipedia’s status . I usually think of Wikipedia without the THE. The Wikipedia doesn’t sound right to me, and when I googled it, I found that, except where wikipedia is used as an adjective (as in <i>the</i> wikipedia archives, <i>the</i> Wikipedia FAQK), the use of an article beforehand is only occasional. For the most part, we refer to Wikipedia as Wikipedia.
Why would this be so?We think of THE Encyclopedia Britannica, but ywe don’t say THE Google. So… what does that say about what wikipedia is, or does it say anything? Is Wikipedia a more ubiquitous version of a generalized something (a socially mediated reference), as absence of an article often indicates? But it isn’t a wikipedia. Or is it a plural thing? (an all rather than each) Oceans are.. the Atlantic Ocean is. Or is it, as suggested here something other. The thing about both “TV” (or “television”) and “new media”, at least according to my Sprachgefuhl, is that both of them can be thought about in more or less abstract (I might even say: fetishized) ways. Is Wikipedia both Wikipedia and the Wikipedia, much as TV and new media are both the thing in itself and something more? Perhaps the lack of article suggests that wikipedia, like Google, is a singularity… requiring no article, yet taking one.. something more than supposition less than proven source. A place to start.
Topics: edtech, education, language |