[Buddha-l] Wikia Buddhism page

[Richard Hayes]

On Monday 07 January 2008 09:41, Erik Hoogcarspel wrote:

> I just found a new buddhism information website. It's free for anyone to
> participate. Wikia is commercial, but the positive side is that it tries
> to break the monopoly of top down search engines.
> http://buddhism.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

This wiki phenomenon is fascinating to watch as it evolves. As a teacher, I am 
sometimes discouraged by the fact that so many students nowadays go no 
further than Dr Google and Professor Wiki for their information on any topic. 
On the other hand, as a deeply opinionated and totally closed-minded advocate 
of open-source software, I have come to appreciate the amount of useful 
documentation on open-source software that is readily available on the 
Internet. Rarely am I stumped for long by a puzzling piece of software, or 
even hardware. When my cat knocked a cup of scalding coffee onto my laptop, a 
wiki article told me exactly what to do to save the computer, and I am still 
using the computer (and feeding the cat). As readers of buddha-l know by now, 
I write only the absolute truth about Buddhism, and that truth is that if 
you're not using a Linux operating system and reading wiki software 
documentation, you're just not a Buddhist. Sorry, but that's just the way 
reality works. But I digress.

When it comes to controversial issues, on the other hand, wiki articles are to 
be taken with liberal pinches of salt. A few years back, the wiki on Zen was 
changing about once an hour as advocates of competing visions of what is True 
Zen duked it out in cyberspace. As I recall, one of the forces at play was 
the so-called Dark Zen outfit, whose main proponents, Mark Vetanen and Ardent 
Hollingsworth, used to amuse the denizens of buddha-l with their thundering 
and almost always vicious denunciations and character assassinations of both 
academics and traditional Asian Zen teachers and their American followers. In 
much the same way that they tried to purge buddha-l of impurities in doctrine 
and practice, they tried to purge the Wikipedia of all influences they found 
dangerous and pernicious. (They seemed to be quite convinced that if we 
somehow got Buddhism wrong, the entire solar system would collapse into a 
black hole.) As a result, the Wikipedia articles on Zen were in a perpetual 
state of flux, thus admirably illustrating the Buddhist doctrine of 
momentariness.

More and more one finds a little tag on Wikipedia articles saying "The 
neutrality of this article is disputed." (Indeed, I recently saw such a tag 
on the Wikipedia entry for the word "wiktionary".) I'm not sure what effect 
such tags have on people. When I see such a tag, my reaction tends to be "So 
what else is new? What of any interest in this world is NOT disputed by 
someone?" Hell, I bet if I wikished (published on a wiki) my favorite recipe 
for Rio Grande Valley chile, its neutrality would be disputed within four 
minutes, probably much sooner. (Even if I wrote on article on Republicans, it 
would probably be disputed within a few months by some damn fool.)

As an unreconstructed academic, and a very mediocre one at that, I personally 
find it healthy that there are fora (that's what hard-assed academics call 
forums) such as Wikipedia on which people can experiment with non-standard 
views about things. For my entire academic career I have been appalled by the 
way that certain received views on things go unchallenged and gain a momentum 
as they are passed on from one generation to another. While the academic 
world tends to love to see itself as populated by hardy individualists who 
think for themselves and come to conclusions only after examining all the 
relevant evidence and have no fear of offering radical critiques of 
established dogmas, the truth is that most of the academic world is in fact 
populated by timid sheep who cower at the mere suspicion of peer disapproval. 
Academics who toe party lines are seen as truth-telling sages, and they get 
the most prestigious jobs and the most lucrative grants and regular 
promotions, while those who challenge the doctrines pushed by the big names 
in any given field tend to publish and then perish. If you want to eat and 
live with a roof over your head, then say what everyone else in the academic 
world believes. (Just ask any academic who's still on buddha-l.) For the 
dissidents in the ranks of academia, Wikipedia has the potential of being a 
venue for their views, if only because the big names are so uninterested in 
Wikipedia articles that they won't bother to obliterate them. (The 
obliteration comes from fanatics like the Dark Zen crew, not from professors 
at Oxford and Harvard.)

Anyway, thanks for the reference to the Wikia Buddhism page, Erik. It will be 
interesting to see how that one evolves.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico