好文精选66篇之41篇——维基百科、《危险边缘》以及事实的命运
发表时间：2020-11-17 09:58:37
Wikipedia, “Jeopardy!,” and the Fate of the Fact
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In the Internet age, it can seem as if there’s no reason to remember anything. But information doesn’t always amount to knowledge.
By Louis Menand
November 16, 2020
Alex Trebek hosted “Jeopardy!” for thirty-seven years, until his death, this month.
Is it still cool to memorize a lot of stuff? Is there even a reason to memorize anything? Having a lot of information in your head was maybe never cool in the sexy-cool sense, more in the geeky-cool or class-brainiac sense. But people respected the ability to rattle off the names of all the state capitals, or to recite the periodic table. It was like the ability to dunk, or to play the piano by ear—something the average person can’t do. It was a harmless show of superiority, and it gave people a kind of species pride.
There is still no artificial substitute for the ability to dunk. It remains a valued and nontransferrable aptitude. But today who needs to know the capital of South Dakota or the atomic number of hafnium (Pierre and 72)? Siri, or whatever chatbot you use, can get you that information in nanoseconds. Remember when, back in the B.D.E. (Before the Digital Era), you’d be sitting around with friends over a bottle of Puligny-Montrachet, and the conversation would turn on the question of when Hegel published “The Phenomenology of Spirit”? Unless you had an encyclopedia for grownups around the house, you’d either have to trek to your local library, whose only copy of the “Phenomenology” was likely to be checked out, or use a primitive version of the “lifeline”—i.e., telephone a Hegel expert. Now you ask your smartphone, which is probably already in your hand. (I just did: 1807. Took less than a second.)
And names and dates are the least of it. Suppose, for example, that you suspected that one of your friends was misusing Hegel’s term “the cunning of reason.” So annoying. But you don’t even have to be sober to straighten that person out. As you contemplate another glass, Siri places in your hand a list of sites where that concept is explained, also in under a second. And, should the conversation ever get serious, Hegel’s entire corpus is searchable online. Interestingly, when I ask Siri, “Is Dick Van Dyke still alive?,” Siri says, “I won’t respond to that.” It’s not clear if that’s because of the Dick or the Dyke. (He is, and he’s ninety-four.)
There is also, of course, tons of instant information that is actually useful, like instructions for grilling corn on the cob, or unclogging a bathtub drain. And it’s free. You do not have to pay a plumber.
Leaving the irrefutably dire and dystopian effects of the Web aside for a moment, this is an amazing accomplishment. In less than twenty years, a huge percentage of the world’s knowledge has become accessible to anyone with a device that has Wi-Fi. Search engines work faster than the mind, and they are way more accurate. There is plenty of misinformation on the Web, but there is plenty of misinformation in your head, too. I just told you what the atomic number of hafnium is. Do you remember it correctly?
The most radical change that instant information has made is the levelling of content. There is no longer a distinction between things that everyone knows, or could readily know, and things that only experts know. “The cunning of reason” is as accessible as the date Hegel’s book was published and the best method for grilling corn. There is no such thing as esoterica anymore. We are all pedants now. Is this a cause for concern? Has it changed the economic and social value of knowledge? Has it put scholars and plumbers out of business and made expertise obsolete?
In the early years of the Web, the hub around which such questions circled was Wikipedia. The site will be twenty years old on January 15th, and a collection of articles by scholars, called “Wikipedia @ 20: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution” (M.I.T.), is being published as a kind of birthday tribute. The authors survey many aspects of the Wiki world, not always uncritically, but the consensus is that Wikipedia is the major success story of the Internet era. A ridiculously simple principle—“Anyone can edit”—has produced a more or less responsibly curated, perpetually up-to-date, and infinitely expandable source of information, almost all of it hyperlinked to multiple additional sources. Andrew Lih’s history of the site, “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia,” published in 2009, is similarly smitten.
Wikipedia took off like a shot. Within a month, it had a thousand articles, a number that would have been impossible using a traditional editorial chain of command. Within three years, it had two hundred thousand articles, and it soon left print encyclopedias in the dust. Today, Wikipedia (according to Wikipedia) has more than fifty-five million articles in three hundred and thirteen languages. In 2020, it is the second most visited site on the Web in the United States, after YouTube, with 1.03 billion visits a month—over four hundred million more visits than the No. 3 Web site, Twitter. The Encyclopædia Britannica, first published in 1768 and for centuries the gold standard of the genre, had sixty-five thousand articles in its last print edition. Since 2012, new editions have been available only online, where it currently ranks fortieth in visits per month, with about thirty-two million.
In the beginning, the notion that you could create a reliable encyclopedia article about Hegel that was not written by, or at least edited by, a credentialled Hegel expert was received, understandably, with skepticism. Teachers treated Wikipedia like the study guide SparkNotes—a shortcut for homework shirkers, and a hodgepodge compiled by autodidacts and trivia buffs. The turning point is customarily said to have been a study published in Nature, in 2005, in which academic scientists compared forty-two science articles in Wikipedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica. The experts determined that Wikipedia averaged four errors per article and Britannica averaged three. “Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its scientific entries” was the editors’ conclusion. By then, many teachers were consulting Wikipedia regularly themselves.
The reason most people today who work in and on digital media have such warm feelings about Wikipedia may be that it’s one of the few surviving sites that adhere to the spirit of the early Internet, to what was known affectionately as the “hacker ethos.” This is the ethos of open-source, free-access software development. Anyone can get in the game, and a person doesn’t need permission to make changes. The prototypical open-source case is the operating system Linux, released in 1991, and much early programming was done in this communal barn-raising spirit. The vision, which now seems distinctly prelapsarian, was of the Web as a bottom-up phenomenon, with no bosses, and no rewards other than the satisfaction of participating in successful innovation.
Even today, no one is paid by Wikipedia, and anyone can (at least in theory, since a kind of editorial pecking order has evolved) change anything, with very few restrictions. In programming shop talk, all work on Wikipedia is “copyleft,” meaning that it can be used, modified, and distributed without permission. No one can claim a proprietary interest. There are scarcely any hard-and-fast rules for writing or editing a Wikipedia article.
That seems to have been what got hacker types, people typically allergic to being told what to do, interested in developing the site. “If rules make you nervous and depressed,” Larry Sanger, the site’s co-founder, with Jimmy Wales, wrote in the early days, “then ignore them and go about your business.”
Wikipedia is also one of the few popular sites whose content is not monetized and whose pages are not personalized. Nothing is behind a paywall; you do not have to log in. There are occasional pop-ups soliciting contributions (in 2017-18, almost a hundred million dollars was donated to the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, headed by Wales), but no one is trying to sell you something. Everyone who looks up Pierre, South Dakota, sees the same page. There is no age-and-gender-appropriate clickbait, no ads for drain de-cloggers and books by German philosophers.
Wikipedia has some principles, of course. Contributors are supposed to maintain a “neutral point of view”; everything must be verifiable and, preferably, given a citation; and—this is probably the key to the site’s success with scholars—there should be no original research. What this means is that Wikipedia is, in essence, an aggregator site. Already existing information is collected, usually from linkable sources, but it is not judged, interpreted, or, for the most part, contextualized. Unlike in scholarly writing, all sources tend to be treated equally. A peer-reviewed journal and a blog are cited without distinction. There is also a semi-official indifference to the quality of the writing. You do not read a Wikipedia article for the pleasures of its prose.
There are consequently very few restrictions on creating a page. The bar is set almost as low as it can be. You can’t post an article on your grandmother’s recipe for duck à l’orange. But there is an article on duck à l’orange. There are four hundred and seventy-two subway stations in New York City; each station has its own Wikipedia page. Many articles are basically vast dumping grounds of links, factoids, and data. Still, all this keeps the teachers and scholars in business, since knowledge isn’t the data. It’s what you do with the data. A quickie summary of “the cunning of reason” does not get you very far into Hegel.
But what about the folks who can recite the periodic table, or who know hundreds of lines of poetry “by heart,” or can tell you the capital of South Dakota right off the bat? Is long-term human memory obsolete? One indication of the answer might be that the highest-rated syndicated program on television for the first ten weeks of 2020 was “Jeopardy!” The ability to recall enormous numbers of facts is still obviously compelling. Geek-cool lives.
“Jeopardy!” is thirty-seven years old under its host Alex Trebek, who died earlier this month, at the age of eighty. But the show is much older than that. It first went on the air in 1964, hosted by Art Fleming, and ran until 1975. And the “Jeopardy!” genre, the game show, is much older still. Like a lot of early television—such as soap operas, news broadcasts, and variety shows—game shows date from radio. The three national broadcast networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—were originally radio networks, so those were genres that programmers already knew.
Shows like “Jeopardy!” were as popular in the early years of television as they are today. In the 1955-56 season, the highest-rated show was “The $64,000 Question,” in which contestants won money by answering questions in different categories. Soon afterward, however, a meteor struck the game-show planet when it was discovered that Charles Van Doren, a contestant on another quiz show, “Twenty-One,” who had built up a huge following and whose face had been on the cover of Time, had been given the answers in advance. It turned out that most television quiz shows were rigged. The news was received as a scandal; there were congressional hearings, and the Communications Act was amended to make “secret assistance” to game-show contestants a federal crime.
Whom did such “assistance” help? Mostly, the networks. When a player is on a streak, audience size increases, because more and more people tune in each week to see if the streak will last. In the nineteen-fifties, there were usually just three shows to choose from in a given time slot, so audiences were enormous. As many as fifty-five million people—a third of the population—tuned in to “The $64,000 Question.” It was the equivalent of broadcasting the Super Bowl every week. The financial upside of a Van Doren was huge.
But the scandal made it clear that game shows are popular because they are also reality television. “Jeopardy!” and “The Apprentice” belong to the same genre. So, for that matter, does TikTok. The premise of reality television is that the contestants are ordinary people, not performers. This approach allows viewers to feel that they are matching wits with the people on the screen, but there is also something awe-inspiring about watching Charles Van Doren, or Ken Jennings, the owner of a six-month winning streak on “Jeopardy!,” run up the score. Still, you have to be able to believe that these people are not professionals, and that they are doing it without help.
In retrospect, the Van Doren fan-demic seems odd. He held advanced degrees and taught at Columbia; he was distinctly not the man on the street. It helped that he was young and good-looking, and that he really seemed to be sweating out the answers. One of the most popular “Jeopardy!” winners, on the other hand, is Frank Spangenberg, who for a long time held the record for five-day winnings ($102,597). Spangenberg was a member of the New York City Transit Police. He was the ideal game-show type, someone viewers can relate to.
As Claire McNear explains in “Answers in the Form of Questions: A Definitive History and Insider’s Guide to ‘Jeopardy!’ ” (Twelve), a book mainly for fans, the Van Doren scandal helped define “Jeopardy!” in two respects. The first is the concept for the show, which is credited to Julann Griffin, Merv Griffin’s wife. She is supposed to have argued that, if it was a crime to give quiz-show contestants the answers in advance, then giving them the answers up front and having them come up with the questions would get the show around the Communications Act. This nonsensical reasoning is repeated in virtually every book on the show.
The other piece of long-term fallout from the quiz-show scandals is that when contestants on “Jeopardy!” return home, and everyone asks them, “So what is Alex Trebek really like?,” they have no answer. This is because, except when the game is in progress, the contestants never interact with him. The policy is intended to insure that no contestant is getting off-camera help (which is also nonsensical, since contestants could be getting help from someone besides the host). But the lack of face time with Trebek is considered a major disappointment.
For Trebek was something between a cult figure and an icon. “Our generation’s Cronkite,” Ken Jennings called him in a column published last year, and the comparison is apt. Walter Cronkite did not report the news. He read cue cards on the air every week night on CBS for nineteen years. Trebek did not write the clues on “Jeopardy!” He read them on the morning of the taping, to make sure he had the pronunciations right. His aura of knowing the answers (or the questions) was, like Cronkite’s air of gravitas, part of the onscreen persona. Cronkite was trained as a journalist. He knew what was going on in the world and he understood the events he reported on. But that is not why he became an icon. Trebek, too, was an educated man with genuine curiosity and many interests. But it would not have mattered if he wasn’t. By some combination of familiarity and longevity, he and Cronkite acquired an outsized cultural status.
Like another TV icon, Johnny Carson, who hosted the “Tonight Show” for thirty years, Trebek’s great talent was for being supremely at ease in front of a camera. Whoever he was when he was at home, on the air he was himself. In thirty-seven years, he never missed a taping. When he was diagnosed with cancer, in March, 2019, he was seventy-eight years old. But he worked right up to the end. On days when he was undergoing treatment, he would be suffering terribly. Between games—“Jeopardy!” tapes five games a day, in Culver City, with fifteen-minute breaks—he sometimes writhed in agony on the floor of his dressing room. Fifteen minutes later, on the set and with the cameras rolling, he behaved as though he were perfectly healthy.
By his own account, offered in his brief and cheery memoir, “The Answer Is: Reflections on My Life” (Simon & Schuster), and confirmed by other reports, including McNear’s, when Trebek was off the air he was more laid-back and salty, less like your eighth-grade math teacher. But his tastes were conventional, and so was his career. He hosted numerous short-lived shows, in Canada, where he was born, and in the U.S., before getting the “Jeopardy!” gig. He did not think that the success of “Jeopardy!”—it ranked No. 1 or 2 among syndicated shows for many years—had anything to do with him. “You could replace me as the host of the show with anybody and it would likely be just as popular,” he says in the memoir. I guess we’ll see.
If there is a mystique about Trebek, one of the things we learn from McNear’s book is that there is also a mystique about the contestants. Today, many of them are not, in fact, ordinary people. They are trivia professionals, people who spend countless hours practicing and preparing. A major skill required on the show, for instance, is mastering the buzzer. Aspiring contestants now manufacture their own buzzers and practice to get reaction times, measured in milliseconds, as low as possible. (You cannot press your buzzer until the host has finished reading the answer; if you press it too early, there is a quarter-second wait before you can press it again, and by then the other contestants are likely to have pressed theirs.) Since contestants who make it onto the show typically know almost all the answers, the outcome tends to turn on who is the fastest buzzer-presser. “A reaction-time test tacked onto a trivia contest” is how one contestant described it.
Competing on “Jeopardy!” brings fame, and for most contestants being able to say that they played a game on the show is all the reward they require. But winning on “Jeopardy!” does not bring riches. In fact, to cast a cold economic eye on the show, “Jeopardy!” contestants constitute an exploited class. Together with its sibling show, “Wheel of Fortune,” another Merv Griffin creation, “Jeopardy!” is said to bring in a hundred and twenty-five million dollars a year. (Griffin wrote the “Jeopardy!” theme tune, and he claimed, before he died, in 2007, to have made more than seventy million dollars in royalties from it.) Trebek, who worked only forty-six days a year, was paid in the neighborhood of ten million dollars.
But contestants’ travel and hotel expenses are not paid, and the second- and third-place finishers do not keep the money they’ve “won”; they are given consolation prizes—two thousand dollars for second place and a thousand dollars for third—plus a tote bag and a “Jeopardy!” cap. (This is to incentivize riskier play.) According to McNear, in the 2017-18 season, the average amount that winners took home was $20,022. In his six-month streak, Jennings won $2.5 million, but during those six months ratings increased by fifty per cent over the previous year’s, and “Jeopardy!” became the second-ranked show on all television, after “CSI.” Two and a half million dollars was a very small price to pay. The riches of “Jeopardy!” are not necessarily what they seem. Other pockets got much fuller than Ken Jennings’s.
Something of the same could be said about Wikipedia’s reputation as a “free encyclopedia.” Yochai Benkler has a peculiar essay in the “Wikipedia @ 20” collection. (Benkler is the lead author of a recent study, widely reported, showing that right-wing media, like Fox and Breitbart, not trolls or Russian hackers, are responsible for most of the misinformation about “voter fraud.”) In his essay on Wikipedia, Benkler argues that the site is “a critical anchor for working alternatives to neoliberalism. . . . People can work together, build a shared identity in a community of practice, and make things they need without resorting to enforced market exchange.”
But that is not quite how Wikipedia works. A major influence on Jimmy Wales’s conception of the site was an essay by Friedrich Hayek called “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” published in 1945, and Hayek is virtually the father of postwar neoliberalism. His tract against planning, “The Road to Serfdom,” published in 1944, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and is still in print. Hayek’s argument about knowledge is the same as the neoliberal argument: markets are self-optimizing mechanisms. No one can know the totality of a given situation, as he puts it in “The Use of Knowledge” (he is talking about economic decision-making), but the optimal solution can be reached “by the interactions of people each of whom possesses only partial knowledge.”
This theory of knowledge is not unrelated to the wisdom-of-crowds scenario in which a group of people are guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. The greater the number of guesses, the closer the mean of all guesses will come to the true number of jelly beans. A crucial part of crowdsourcing knowledge is not to exclude any guesses. This is why Wales, in his role as Wikipedia’s grand arbiter, is notoriously permissive about allowing access to the site’s editing function, and why he doesn’t care whether some of the editors are discovered to be impostors, people pretending to expertise that they don’t really have. For, when you are calculating the mean, the outliers are as important as the numbers that cluster around the average. The only way for the articles to be self-correcting is not to correct, to let the invisible hand do its job. Wikipedia is neoliberalism applied to knowledge.
Still, the people who post and who edit the articles on Wikipedia are not guessing jelly beans. They are culling knowledge that has already been paid for—by universities, by publishers, by think tanks and research institutes, by taxpayers. The editors at Nature who, back in 2005, compared Wikipedia with the Encyclopædia Britannica seem not to have considered whether one reason Wikipedia’s science entries had fewer errors than they expected was that its contributors could consult the Encyclopædia Britannica, which pays its contributors. There is no such thing as a free fact. ♦
Published in the print edition of the November 23, 2020, issue, with the headline “What Do You Know?.”
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In the Internet age, it can seem as if there’s no reason to remember anything. But information doesn’t always amount to knowledge.
By Louis Menand
November 16, 2020
Alex Trebek hosted “Jeopardy!” for thirty-seven years, until his death, this month.
Is it still cool to memorize a lot of stuff? Is there even a reason to memorize anything? Having a lot of information in your head was maybe never cool in the sexy-cool sense, more in the geeky-cool or class-brainiac sense. But people respected the ability to rattle off the names of all the state capitals, or to recite the periodic table. It was like the ability to dunk, or to play the piano by ear—something the average person can’t do. It was a harmless show of superiority, and it gave people a kind of species pride.
There is still no artificial substitute for the ability to dunk. It remains a valued and nontransferrable aptitude. But today who needs to know the capital of South Dakota or the atomic number of hafnium (Pierre and 72)? Siri, or whatever chatbot you use, can get you that information in nanoseconds. Remember when, back in the B.D.E. (Before the Digital Era), you’d be sitting around with friends over a bottle of Puligny-Montrachet, and the conversation would turn on the question of when Hegel published “The Phenomenology of Spirit”? Unless you had an encyclopedia for grownups around the house, you’d either have to trek to your local library, whose only copy of the “Phenomenology” was likely to be checked out, or use a primitive version of the “lifeline”—i.e., telephone a Hegel expert. Now you ask your smartphone, which is probably already in your hand. (I just did: 1807. Took less than a second.)
And names and dates are the least of it. Suppose, for example, that you suspected that one of your friends was misusing Hegel’s term “the cunning of reason.” So annoying. But you don’t even have to be sober to straighten that person out. As you contemplate another glass, Siri places in your hand a list of sites where that concept is explained, also in under a second. And, should the conversation ever get serious, Hegel’s entire corpus is searchable online. Interestingly, when I ask Siri, “Is Dick Van Dyke still alive?,” Siri says, “I won’t respond to that.” It’s not clear if that’s because of the Dick or the Dyke. (He is, and he’s ninety-four.)
There is also, of course, tons of instant information that is actually useful, like instructions for grilling corn on the cob, or unclogging a bathtub drain. And it’s free. You do not have to pay a plumber.
Leaving the irrefutably dire and dystopian effects of the Web aside for a moment, this is an amazing accomplishment. In less than twenty years, a huge percentage of the world’s knowledge has become accessible to anyone with a device that has Wi-Fi. Search engines work faster than the mind, and they are way more accurate. There is plenty of misinformation on the Web, but there is plenty of misinformation in your head, too. I just told you what the atomic number of hafnium is. Do you remember it correctly?
The most radical change that instant information has made is the levelling of content. There is no longer a distinction between things that everyone knows, or could readily know, and things that only experts know. “The cunning of reason” is as accessible as the date Hegel’s book was published and the best method for grilling corn. There is no such thing as esoterica anymore. We are all pedants now. Is this a cause for concern? Has it changed the economic and social value of knowledge? Has it put scholars and plumbers out of business and made expertise obsolete?
In the early years of the Web, the hub around which such questions circled was Wikipedia. The site will be twenty years old on January 15th, and a collection of articles by scholars, called “Wikipedia @ 20: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution” (M.I.T.), is being published as a kind of birthday tribute. The authors survey many aspects of the Wiki world, not always uncritically, but the consensus is that Wikipedia is the major success story of the Internet era. A ridiculously simple principle—“Anyone can edit”—has produced a more or less responsibly curated, perpetually up-to-date, and infinitely expandable source of information, almost all of it hyperlinked to multiple additional sources. Andrew Lih’s history of the site, “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia,” published in 2009, is similarly smitten.
Wikipedia took off like a shot. Within a month, it had a thousand articles, a number that would have been impossible using a traditional editorial chain of command. Within three years, it had two hundred thousand articles, and it soon left print encyclopedias in the dust. Today, Wikipedia (according to Wikipedia) has more than fifty-five million articles in three hundred and thirteen languages. In 2020, it is the second most visited site on the Web in the United States, after YouTube, with 1.03 billion visits a month—over four hundred million more visits than the No. 3 Web site, Twitter. The Encyclopædia Britannica, first published in 1768 and for centuries the gold standard of the genre, had sixty-five thousand articles in its last print edition. Since 2012, new editions have been available only online, where it currently ranks fortieth in visits per month, with about thirty-two million.
In the beginning, the notion that you could create a reliable encyclopedia article about Hegel that was not written by, or at least edited by, a credentialled Hegel expert was received, understandably, with skepticism. Teachers treated Wikipedia like the study guide SparkNotes—a shortcut for homework shirkers, and a hodgepodge compiled by autodidacts and trivia buffs. The turning point is customarily said to have been a study published in Nature, in 2005, in which academic scientists compared forty-two science articles in Wikipedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica. The experts determined that Wikipedia averaged four errors per article and Britannica averaged three. “Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its scientific entries” was the editors’ conclusion. By then, many teachers were consulting Wikipedia regularly themselves.
The reason most people today who work in and on digital media have such warm feelings about Wikipedia may be that it’s one of the few surviving sites that adhere to the spirit of the early Internet, to what was known affectionately as the “hacker ethos.” This is the ethos of open-source, free-access software development. Anyone can get in the game, and a person doesn’t need permission to make changes. The prototypical open-source case is the operating system Linux, released in 1991, and much early programming was done in this communal barn-raising spirit. The vision, which now seems distinctly prelapsarian, was of the Web as a bottom-up phenomenon, with no bosses, and no rewards other than the satisfaction of participating in successful innovation.
Even today, no one is paid by Wikipedia, and anyone can (at least in theory, since a kind of editorial pecking order has evolved) change anything, with very few restrictions. In programming shop talk, all work on Wikipedia is “copyleft,” meaning that it can be used, modified, and distributed without permission. No one can claim a proprietary interest. There are scarcely any hard-and-fast rules for writing or editing a Wikipedia article.
That seems to have been what got hacker types, people typically allergic to being told what to do, interested in developing the site. “If rules make you nervous and depressed,” Larry Sanger, the site’s co-founder, with Jimmy Wales, wrote in the early days, “then ignore them and go about your business.”
Wikipedia is also one of the few popular sites whose content is not monetized and whose pages are not personalized. Nothing is behind a paywall; you do not have to log in. There are occasional pop-ups soliciting contributions (in 2017-18, almost a hundred million dollars was donated to the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, headed by Wales), but no one is trying to sell you something. Everyone who looks up Pierre, South Dakota, sees the same page. There is no age-and-gender-appropriate clickbait, no ads for drain de-cloggers and books by German philosophers.
Wikipedia has some principles, of course. Contributors are supposed to maintain a “neutral point of view”; everything must be verifiable and, preferably, given a citation; and—this is probably the key to the site’s success with scholars—there should be no original research. What this means is that Wikipedia is, in essence, an aggregator site. Already existing information is collected, usually from linkable sources, but it is not judged, interpreted, or, for the most part, contextualized. Unlike in scholarly writing, all sources tend to be treated equally. A peer-reviewed journal and a blog are cited without distinction. There is also a semi-official indifference to the quality of the writing. You do not read a Wikipedia article for the pleasures of its prose.
There are consequently very few restrictions on creating a page. The bar is set almost as low as it can be. You can’t post an article on your grandmother’s recipe for duck à l’orange. But there is an article on duck à l’orange. There are four hundred and seventy-two subway stations in New York City; each station has its own Wikipedia page. Many articles are basically vast dumping grounds of links, factoids, and data. Still, all this keeps the teachers and scholars in business, since knowledge isn’t the data. It’s what you do with the data. A quickie summary of “the cunning of reason” does not get you very far into Hegel.
But what about the folks who can recite the periodic table, or who know hundreds of lines of poetry “by heart,” or can tell you the capital of South Dakota right off the bat? Is long-term human memory obsolete? One indication of the answer might be that the highest-rated syndicated program on television for the first ten weeks of 2020 was “Jeopardy!” The ability to recall enormous numbers of facts is still obviously compelling. Geek-cool lives.
“Jeopardy!” is thirty-seven years old under its host Alex Trebek, who died earlier this month, at the age of eighty. But the show is much older than that. It first went on the air in 1964, hosted by Art Fleming, and ran until 1975. And the “Jeopardy!” genre, the game show, is much older still. Like a lot of early television—such as soap operas, news broadcasts, and variety shows—game shows date from radio. The three national broadcast networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—were originally radio networks, so those were genres that programmers already knew.
Shows like “Jeopardy!” were as popular in the early years of television as they are today. In the 1955-56 season, the highest-rated show was “The $64,000 Question,” in which contestants won money by answering questions in different categories. Soon afterward, however, a meteor struck the game-show planet when it was discovered that Charles Van Doren, a contestant on another quiz show, “Twenty-One,” who had built up a huge following and whose face had been on the cover of Time, had been given the answers in advance. It turned out that most television quiz shows were rigged. The news was received as a scandal; there were congressional hearings, and the Communications Act was amended to make “secret assistance” to game-show contestants a federal crime.
Whom did such “assistance” help? Mostly, the networks. When a player is on a streak, audience size increases, because more and more people tune in each week to see if the streak will last. In the nineteen-fifties, there were usually just three shows to choose from in a given time slot, so audiences were enormous. As many as fifty-five million people—a third of the population—tuned in to “The $64,000 Question.” It was the equivalent of broadcasting the Super Bowl every week. The financial upside of a Van Doren was huge.
But the scandal made it clear that game shows are popular because they are also reality television. “Jeopardy!” and “The Apprentice” belong to the same genre. So, for that matter, does TikTok. The premise of reality television is that the contestants are ordinary people, not performers. This approach allows viewers to feel that they are matching wits with the people on the screen, but there is also something awe-inspiring about watching Charles Van Doren, or Ken Jennings, the owner of a six-month winning streak on “Jeopardy!,” run up the score. Still, you have to be able to believe that these people are not professionals, and that they are doing it without help.
In retrospect, the Van Doren fan-demic seems odd. He held advanced degrees and taught at Columbia; he was distinctly not the man on the street. It helped that he was young and good-looking, and that he really seemed to be sweating out the answers. One of the most popular “Jeopardy!” winners, on the other hand, is Frank Spangenberg, who for a long time held the record for five-day winnings ($102,597). Spangenberg was a member of the New York City Transit Police. He was the ideal game-show type, someone viewers can relate to.
As Claire McNear explains in “Answers in the Form of Questions: A Definitive History and Insider’s Guide to ‘Jeopardy!’ ” (Twelve), a book mainly for fans, the Van Doren scandal helped define “Jeopardy!” in two respects. The first is the concept for the show, which is credited to Julann Griffin, Merv Griffin’s wife. She is supposed to have argued that, if it was a crime to give quiz-show contestants the answers in advance, then giving them the answers up front and having them come up with the questions would get the show around the Communications Act. This nonsensical reasoning is repeated in virtually every book on the show.
The other piece of long-term fallout from the quiz-show scandals is that when contestants on “Jeopardy!” return home, and everyone asks them, “So what is Alex Trebek really like?,” they have no answer. This is because, except when the game is in progress, the contestants never interact with him. The policy is intended to insure that no contestant is getting off-camera help (which is also nonsensical, since contestants could be getting help from someone besides the host). But the lack of face time with Trebek is considered a major disappointment.
For Trebek was something between a cult figure and an icon. “Our generation’s Cronkite,” Ken Jennings called him in a column published last year, and the comparison is apt. Walter Cronkite did not report the news. He read cue cards on the air every week night on CBS for nineteen years. Trebek did not write the clues on “Jeopardy!” He read them on the morning of the taping, to make sure he had the pronunciations right. His aura of knowing the answers (or the questions) was, like Cronkite’s air of gravitas, part of the onscreen persona. Cronkite was trained as a journalist. He knew what was going on in the world and he understood the events he reported on. But that is not why he became an icon. Trebek, too, was an educated man with genuine curiosity and many interests. But it would not have mattered if he wasn’t. By some combination of familiarity and longevity, he and Cronkite acquired an outsized cultural status.
Like another TV icon, Johnny Carson, who hosted the “Tonight Show” for thirty years, Trebek’s great talent was for being supremely at ease in front of a camera. Whoever he was when he was at home, on the air he was himself. In thirty-seven years, he never missed a taping. When he was diagnosed with cancer, in March, 2019, he was seventy-eight years old. But he worked right up to the end. On days when he was undergoing treatment, he would be suffering terribly. Between games—“Jeopardy!” tapes five games a day, in Culver City, with fifteen-minute breaks—he sometimes writhed in agony on the floor of his dressing room. Fifteen minutes later, on the set and with the cameras rolling, he behaved as though he were perfectly healthy.
By his own account, offered in his brief and cheery memoir, “The Answer Is: Reflections on My Life” (Simon & Schuster), and confirmed by other reports, including McNear’s, when Trebek was off the air he was more laid-back and salty, less like your eighth-grade math teacher. But his tastes were conventional, and so was his career. He hosted numerous short-lived shows, in Canada, where he was born, and in the U.S., before getting the “Jeopardy!” gig. He did not think that the success of “Jeopardy!”—it ranked No. 1 or 2 among syndicated shows for many years—had anything to do with him. “You could replace me as the host of the show with anybody and it would likely be just as popular,” he says in the memoir. I guess we’ll see.
If there is a mystique about Trebek, one of the things we learn from McNear’s book is that there is also a mystique about the contestants. Today, many of them are not, in fact, ordinary people. They are trivia professionals, people who spend countless hours practicing and preparing. A major skill required on the show, for instance, is mastering the buzzer. Aspiring contestants now manufacture their own buzzers and practice to get reaction times, measured in milliseconds, as low as possible. (You cannot press your buzzer until the host has finished reading the answer; if you press it too early, there is a quarter-second wait before you can press it again, and by then the other contestants are likely to have pressed theirs.) Since contestants who make it onto the show typically know almost all the answers, the outcome tends to turn on who is the fastest buzzer-presser. “A reaction-time test tacked onto a trivia contest” is how one contestant described it.
Competing on “Jeopardy!” brings fame, and for most contestants being able to say that they played a game on the show is all the reward they require. But winning on “Jeopardy!” does not bring riches. In fact, to cast a cold economic eye on the show, “Jeopardy!” contestants constitute an exploited class. Together with its sibling show, “Wheel of Fortune,” another Merv Griffin creation, “Jeopardy!” is said to bring in a hundred and twenty-five million dollars a year. (Griffin wrote the “Jeopardy!” theme tune, and he claimed, before he died, in 2007, to have made more than seventy million dollars in royalties from it.) Trebek, who worked only forty-six days a year, was paid in the neighborhood of ten million dollars.
But contestants’ travel and hotel expenses are not paid, and the second- and third-place finishers do not keep the money they’ve “won”; they are given consolation prizes—two thousand dollars for second place and a thousand dollars for third—plus a tote bag and a “Jeopardy!” cap. (This is to incentivize riskier play.) According to McNear, in the 2017-18 season, the average amount that winners took home was $20,022. In his six-month streak, Jennings won $2.5 million, but during those six months ratings increased by fifty per cent over the previous year’s, and “Jeopardy!” became the second-ranked show on all television, after “CSI.” Two and a half million dollars was a very small price to pay. The riches of “Jeopardy!” are not necessarily what they seem. Other pockets got much fuller than Ken Jennings’s.
Something of the same could be said about Wikipedia’s reputation as a “free encyclopedia.” Yochai Benkler has a peculiar essay in the “Wikipedia @ 20” collection. (Benkler is the lead author of a recent study, widely reported, showing that right-wing media, like Fox and Breitbart, not trolls or Russian hackers, are responsible for most of the misinformation about “voter fraud.”) In his essay on Wikipedia, Benkler argues that the site is “a critical anchor for working alternatives to neoliberalism. . . . People can work together, build a shared identity in a community of practice, and make things they need without resorting to enforced market exchange.”
But that is not quite how Wikipedia works. A major influence on Jimmy Wales’s conception of the site was an essay by Friedrich Hayek called “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” published in 1945, and Hayek is virtually the father of postwar neoliberalism. His tract against planning, “The Road to Serfdom,” published in 1944, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and is still in print. Hayek’s argument about knowledge is the same as the neoliberal argument: markets are self-optimizing mechanisms. No one can know the totality of a given situation, as he puts it in “The Use of Knowledge” (he is talking about economic decision-making), but the optimal solution can be reached “by the interactions of people each of whom possesses only partial knowledge.”
This theory of knowledge is not unrelated to the wisdom-of-crowds scenario in which a group of people are guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. The greater the number of guesses, the closer the mean of all guesses will come to the true number of jelly beans. A crucial part of crowdsourcing knowledge is not to exclude any guesses. This is why Wales, in his role as Wikipedia’s grand arbiter, is notoriously permissive about allowing access to the site’s editing function, and why he doesn’t care whether some of the editors are discovered to be impostors, people pretending to expertise that they don’t really have. For, when you are calculating the mean, the outliers are as important as the numbers that cluster around the average. The only way for the articles to be self-correcting is not to correct, to let the invisible hand do its job. Wikipedia is neoliberalism applied to knowledge.
Still, the people who post and who edit the articles on Wikipedia are not guessing jelly beans. They are culling knowledge that has already been paid for—by universities, by publishers, by think tanks and research institutes, by taxpayers. The editors at Nature who, back in 2005, compared Wikipedia with the Encyclopædia Britannica seem not to have considered whether one reason Wikipedia’s science entries had fewer errors than they expected was that its contributors could consult the Encyclopædia Britannica, which pays its contributors. There is no such thing as a free fact. ♦
Published in the print edition of the November 23, 2020, issue, with the headline “What Do You Know?.”
