Everything is Miscellaneous

The history of organizing information provides the fodder for the first few chapters of David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous. The Dewey Decimal system, the Periodic Table and even the development of alphabetization are outlined and explored. It’s the chapter Social Knowing where he makes his most compelling case for the value of knowledge as not just the privilege of the elite or educated but a social act. He sings the praises of the social power of sites like zillow.com, blogs and, in particular, Wikipedia. Authority, and the "truth" it frequently uses to defend or engage its own interests, better watch its back, according to Weinberger.

“In a miscellaneous world, an Oz-like authority that speaks in a single voice with unshakeable confidence is a blowhard. Authority now comes from enabling us inescapably fallible creatures to explore the differences among us, together”, he writes.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the pre-eminent literary authority The New Yorker, takes a slightly different tone in the article “Know It All” by Stacy Schiff. A study done by the journal Nature comparing the errors in science articles in Wikipedia to those in the august Encyclopedia Britannica found, according to Weinberger, that “they are roughly equivalent” lending credibility to the new kid on the block. For Schiff, “ according to the survey, Wikipedia had four errors for every three of Britannica’s, a result that, oddly, was hailed as a triumph for the upstart.”

Reading the Social Knowing chapter alongside Schiff’s piece is edifying in that they compliment each other and underscore the often relative or interpretive nature of the “truth”. For Weinberger, the beauty of social knowing is that it “changes who does the knowing and how, more than it changes the what of knowledge”. Changes, corrections, multiple perspectives can be, and are, updated repeatedly, constantly on an interactive site like Wikipedia. Ironically, an editor’s note to the Schiff article was added at an undetermined date and could only, obviously, be added to its website and not the print publication.

Both author’s acknowledge that errors happen. Weinberger, in the Emersonian tradition of not fearing a little dirt, considers them to be a part of the work.