The Persistence of Error

The other day the old French round, French Cathedrals, was stuck in my head, the victim of some benign cognitive itch. There is a term for songs that you can’t get out of your mind; songs you mentally sing all day. The word is earworm, from the German Ohrwurm. Knowing the word is not the point however.

What I found when I searched the Internet for the few words I couldn’t recall was all too common—a variety of cathedral names, either incorrect or spelled “creatively.” In this particular instance Beaugency and the words after Notre Dame were up for grabs. [Incidentally my spell checker does not like the word Beaugency. It has offered the word “biogenic” as a replacement. Ah, but spell check’s a whole blog entry of its own.]

As a professional librarian I try to avoid giving any information source from wikipedia. Wikis are fun and can be a place to jump off when all else fails, but wikis are risky. Whether the errors come from a deliberate attempt to mislead or from an over-willing spirit, once the error appears, it persists in the electronic ether a very long time. Librarians like to find the most authoritative source possible. By authoritative we mean an expert source. If the only result GOOGLE can give is a wiki answer, the librarian needs to try a different approach—maybe a book. Of course there is also the possibility—fortunately very rare—that there is no answer. Yes, sometimes the answer does not exist. Making one up is not ethical.

Books can contain errors too. It’s a good idea to look at more than one source. Occasionally an authoritative source, for example, a journal article, may contain mistakes. I often suspect some of these errors are deliberate so those who plagiarize can be identified. Others may be typos, but these types of errors generally do not affect the correctness of the information in a reputable source.

Yes, people make innocent spelling errors. My Misspeller’s Dictionary has been heavily thumbed. Spelling may soon become an endangered skill. Instant messengers have a lexicon no dictionary could wish to include. But the problem is much deeper than shortcuts, spelling errors and typos. It goes way beyond “wikiinfo.” The ease and anonymity of Internet information creation fosters a culture of those who don’t really care about accuracy or truth. Contributor e-prints are raisons d’être. Information is egalitarian in its inception. Its creation is a World Wide Web right. Content, and more importantly, context, is not particularly important. After all, information begins with an “I.”

Equally important to the perpetuation of mistakes in today’s asynchronous and instantaneous media is the lack of critical evaluation. People are only too willing to believe what they read on the Internet, or hear around the water cooler for that matter. Evaluation is a skill that must be nutured. Questions must be asked. The information seeker needs to ask about the credentials of the source. Does this information jibe with what is already known? Is there some sort of “agenda” behind the information? Is the information seeker relying too much on a social consensus? How important is truth?

The persistence of misinformation is insidious. The lack of intellectual rigor will undermine the corpus of knowledge that has been painstakingly created over centuries. Mistakes are self perpetuating. Fundamental elements of knowledge that are built on the shifting sands of social affirmation will collapse eventually. I worry that those who will need to reconstruct reliable information, those who will need to organize that information into knowledge, will no longer have the intellectual tools necessary for the job.

If this happens, then the irony of the situation derives from the inception of the Internet itself. Back in the late 1960s, universities, government entities, and the defense establishment created a network through which accurate and timely information could be shared. The many “creative” versions of French cathedrals was not what they intended.