Familysearch Family Tree and Wikipedia
Both:
- Are free open publicly crowdsourced databases of information about people, places, events, and more
- Focus on citation: making easy to use, intuitive tools for new users to cite sources
- Have user interfaces that are insensitive to old people who struggle with small font defaults
- Have mechanisms for meta-discussion
- Are about disseminating true ideas
- Operate on a fantastically disproportionate ratio of people who might have knowledge of a topic : people who contribute knowledge to said topic
- Are subject to attacks and vandals
- Have only a small handful of employees
- Are charitable organizations financed entirely by donations
- Can be places where you run into problems with people messing up your contributions
- Have, in such cases, the ability for certain pages to have barriers to change placed on them
Familysearch Family Tree:
- Is an acceptable place to share original research
- Allows a person's own knowledge of a subject to be cited
- Has at least five public (ie non-PM) spaces for interactive meta-research discussion among contributors, all of which are easily accessible by non-programmers
- probably has more female contributors than male contributors
- Focuses on striving to be an easy tool for the world to use. Example: Familysearch Family Tree Lite, which is designed for fast loading on mobile devices for places like Mexico which skipped the PC era of computing and went straight to mobile phones
- is the project by which all the people who died without having the chance to be baptized while living can receive that chance by proxy; aka a strong religious motivation for some users to publicly contribute true information in a timely, courteous manner
- Has an intuitive, fast learning curve for new contributors
- has a smaller user base than it wants
Wikipedia:
- Only recognized records, and not personal experience/memory/knowledge, as a valid source
- Has only two public (ie non-PM) spaces for meta-research discussion: a person's personal talk page and a talk page of a subject, neither of which have a visual editor. This highly favors the accessibility of programmers who are not intimidated by streams of unformatted courier font surrounded by <HTML tags> which is literally as intimidating/frustrating to non-programmers as a foreign language.
- Has far more male contributors than female contributors
- Seems to value intentional barriers to contribution such as disallowing machine translation from x language to English, steep learning curve for cultural expectations of communication, and unintuitive GUI's
- lacks religious motivation for contributors, unless placing words upon the altar of hubristic human pride is one's religion, which it actually seems to often be
- has a steep learning curve for new contributors
- has the highest user base for any website online; just about everyone in the world with internet access has used Wikipedia and knows about Wikipedia's existence
- is not limited to creating a sprawling tree of information about the human family, but is rather a sprawling tree of information about EVERYTHING*
- ...*ish
My own personal epistemologic philosophies and values have never felt so relevant to me as when I first took a look at the back-end of Wikipedia and experienced first-hand how it's created. How do I know something is true? What is the source of knowledge and wisdom?
Jesus Christ taught, "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled." (Matthew 5:6)
Hannah, mother of the Old Testament prophet Samuel said, "the LORD is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed." (1 Samuel 2:2)
The only source of absolute truth is God. Everything else is an approximation or imitation. The way to gain spiritual knowledge is not by searching the internet. It's by searching the scriptures and words of the prophets. It's by searching my soul in genuine, quiet introspection. It's by listening to a voice that is quieter but more trustworthy than that belonging to any human. It is by worshipping God through active decisions to strive to keep covenants, commandments, and commitments to my callings. Spiritual knowledge comes from walking by faith.
I feel bitter that my efforts to understand spiritual truth and gain spiritual knowledge are not celebrated publicly the way online contributions in both these aforementioned online spaces are. But do I want actual greatness, or just to look great to other people? I guess the truth is that I want to *feel* great, but if actually being great requires me to give even that up, I would.
I constantly feel so parched and famished. Jesus's words seem to assure me that this feeling is both acceptable and temporary. It is comforting.
No comments:
Post a Comment