Bad sources again

I commented recently on the odd practice of The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site in linking to Wikipedia. Why would CiF, seeking a quick reference to - in the case I was citing - the Srebrenica massacre, go not to The Guardian's own archive of outstanding reporting and analysis from the Balkans, but to a site where no competence and knowledge are required to edit an article? I don't know the answer. I can only guess that CiF's editors do this because in large parts of the Web it's standard practice to treat Wikipedia as a point of reference. Possibly the thinking is that CiF should do likewise for fear of appearing impossibly old-fashioned.

In any event, it's a shame. Touting Wikipedia as a reference source - as, disgracefully, the Education Secretary did last month - is faddism not pedagogy. It undermines the distinction between expertise and its absence, and between knowledge and mere loudness; I'm sorry to see CiF's tolerance of it. I've noticed that my own contributions to CiF are treated the same way. Links to Wikipedia are regularly inserted after I've submitted copy. And it's not only CiF: other reputable opinion sites and online magazines follow the same practice. I'm amazed. Why do editors not ask the author of a piece for a a brief definition or summary of a particular concept if they feel it needs expansion? I'd gladly do it.

Here's another example why CiF and other sites ought to change practice. CiF's "Take Two" forum - an exchange of views between two contributors on a stated issue - comprises this week a controversy between the feminist writer Naomi Wolf and the sociologist Alan Wolfe. The question - on which one of those contributors has a monopoly of wisdom and sense - is: "Is America on the road to fascism?"

Sure enough, CiF's editors have linked to the Wikipedia entry for "fascism" (and so, reluctantly, do I, to make this point). I turned to it and found an article whose tone and quality can be illustrated with this excerpt, purportedly explaining the Hitler-Stalin pact:

Initially, the Soviet Union supported a coalition with the western powers against Nazi Germany and popular fronts in various countries against domestic fascism. This policy was largely unsuccessful due to the distrust shown by the western powers (especially Britain) towards the Soviet Union. The Munich Agreement between Germany, France and Britain heightened Soviet fears that the western powers were endeavoring to force them to bear the brunt of a war against Nazism. The lack of eagerness on the part of the British during diplomatic negotiations with the Soviets served to make the situation even worse. The Soviets changed their policy and negotiated a non-aggression pact known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939.

Where do you start with this ignorant, pernicious and ungrammatical Stalinist propaganda? Do CiF's editors know (and perhaps they can tell me) that, instead of providing for their readers a working definition of fascism, they've linked to a piece of dreary agitprop that omits any reference to Stalin's expansionist designs? It's not an article you can judiciously amend with a few historical facts. It's ahistorical nonsense of a high order. Compare it with a serious and scholarly account of Stalin's attitude to the European powers, viz. R.C. Raack, Stalin's Drive to the West, 1938-1945, 1995, and particularly p. 20:

If we trace Stalin's hopes in the Czech crisis of 1938 back from the existing record of his secret Trotskyite programmatic leitmotif of war and revolution that took definite form just a year or so later during the Polish crisis of 1939, we can infer that in 1938, just as in 1939, Stalin very much wanted a general war with the West, though without his participation, with the British, French, and Germans bogged down in a reciprocally debilitating conflict over Czechoslovakia. It was just such a war that his quick agreement with Hitler, manufactured in not entirely dissimilar circumstances in the sumer of 1939, was clearly designed to encourage.

I recently commented on a trivial error in Wikipedia on which I could speak with some knowledge because it concerned my family. As I had expected, someone then corrected the relevant entry and pronounced that the revision showed that my criticism was ill founded. With respect: it didn't. My beef with Wikipedia is not that it contains errors - all reference sources do - but that by design it makes no discrimination between different kinds of contribution. Wikipedia is an essentially anti-intellectual venture. One correspondent asked why, if I had found an error in Wikipedia, I did not merely join in and correct it myself. My answer, I hope, is clear: because I believe it is better to carp from the sidelines and hope for the eventual implosion of the whole enterprise than to contribute constructively to incremental improvements in it.