Our world is full of battles. The war of the encyclopedias is a war that no one imagined.
The word encyclopedia is strongly Greek but began to have importance around 1750, in Paris, when a group of “philosophers” – who today we will call, with forgiveness, intellectuals – plotted without problems against the tyrannies of the time: the king, the Church and all its commandments. Those were times – even those – in which knowledge was the way to rebel against the superstitions of the majority.
Then two gentlemen, Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert, united their names forever in a bold gesture: they would compile a Encyclopedia or reasoned dictionary of sciences, arts and craftsa space to collect all the knowledge of time and reveal all its deceptions. For this reason they asked many colleagues for articles: there were, obviously, Voltaire and Rousseau and many others. There were 28 volumes in 20 years, 71,818 articles, threats and prisons for their authors, many new ideas. Those intellectuals, whom we still call “encyclopedists”, paved the way for the French Revolution.
Two centuries later, the Internet, which put an end to classical encyclopedias, created one that recaptured that spirit. Wikipedia It is made up of thousands of people who collaborate in the assembly of a common body. It is no longer the “authorities” who give it authority but the community, the wiki, in one of the few projects that return to the original illusion that the Internet would be an egalitarian and democratic space, so different from the real world. It’s not, but Wikipedia It seems so and it shows that common construction works.
So much so that one of his bitterest enemies, Mr. Elon Musk, very rich by profession, with a pure yo-yo brain, decided to fight back. A few days ago the gentleman launched his Grokipediaa copy of Wikipedia made by an artificial intelligence programmed to spread its vision of the world. For now it’s only in English – if they don’t know it, let them learn – and it’s almost a joke, but also a lesson in what they call truth.
Jordi Pérez Colomé provided a perfect example in these pages, comparing their articles on George Floyd, whose murder sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. Your entry into Wikipedia It begins like this: “On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black American man, was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a 44-year-old white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Floyd was arrested when a store clerk reported him for making a purchase with a counterfeit $20 bill.”
In GrokipediaInstead, it begins: “George Perry Floyd Jr. was an American with a lengthy criminal record, including convictions for armed robbery, drug possession and theft in Texas between 1997 and 2007…” – and then says he was killed by a police officer and that his action “precipitated major riots that caused billions of dollars in property damage.”
The differences are evident. But the most interesting thing, in this world so concerned with feikñús, is that none of them lie: everything they say is true, nothing is false.
The big difference is the appearance. For too long journalism textbooks and professors have insisted on “objectivity” as the profession’s fundamental virtue. Objectivity does not exist: when someone, even a machine, tells something, it can only do so by using its own knowledge and ideas about the world – its own subjectivity – to decide what to show. We have been taught to think that subjectivity is a dirty word, synonymous with deception. It’s not; It’s the only way a narrator can tell something: by placing emphasis on what seems most meaningful to him, most useful for telling his story.
So, neither Wikipedia neither of them Grokipedia they lie. They don’t need it: everyone highlights what interests them most, what they want to say. And the reader should ask not why they lie to me but why and why they tell me this.
Hence the current polarization of media consumption: readers seek media with which they agree, to receive points of view close to their own. And so we are: the problem is not lies but the fall of the myth of truth: there is no truth, there are truths and stories. The problem is not lies but the collapse of the myth of objectivity: objectivity does not exist, there are people or machines that, when they tell stories, choose what they tell; there is no other way.
Even in encyclopedias.
