What if your child gets an assignment to write a two-page paper on the US War on Terror or the role of the Muslim world during the American invasion of Iraq/Afghanistan? With information overflowing on the internet and with the ever decreasing trend of reading books, the highly likely way to go about the research would be to Google it or search for it online.

After entering the keywords for the relevant information, a few links would appear. Wikipedia would probably show up in the first few links. Most children would go through it and finish the assignment. A few curious ones or teachers’ pets might search further and may come across a number of viewpoints, different sides to the same story and remarkable differences in perspective on the same seemingly innocuous issue yet; that might even confuse them more.

What we are accepting and branding as a fact collectively today might not be a real fact at all. No wonder we are rapidly approaching that era where a correct piece of knowledge and widely accepted known facts might become antonyms to each other than anything else.

For centuries, kings, dictators and even aristocrats would ensure that only that piece of information that pertained to their nobility and bravery went into the history books. For this they hired ghost writers, who would pen their autobiographies for them, or historians who were paid to manipulate the facts to their sponsor’s liking. Even today things aren’t that crystal clear. Other than getting access to the correct information, part of the bigger debate is the credibility of the sources being quoted.

In the search for any information, when the first link popping up, that is Wikipedia, actually gives right to change, challenge and modify the content on its website and ‘Wikipedia edit wars’ actually narrates to the actively participated, contradictory comments and views from two or more schools of thoughts on the same sensitive yet debatable issue, then segregating right from wrong becomes even more difficult and imperative, simultaneously.

According to a research based on the most controversial topics in Wikipedia that would entice the ‘edit wars’ in the open encyclopaedia, a few topics were debated locally while some key topics were being contested globally. The researchers analysed the changes being made by one editor and how the content is then further modified by the subsequent editor, sparking the ‘edit wars’.

They studied the encyclopaedia website in 10 different versions and realised that subjects such as God, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), Jesus, Christianity, Holocaust, Israel, and Hitler were the most controversial and regularly fought over and edited topics of the lot, common to all 10 editions. However, there were many debated topics that were particular to specific geographical areas or in a certain language edition only. Based on their findings they were able to tabulate the lists of the 10 most controversial topics in 10 different languages (versions) of Wikipedia. Interestingly, the list of 10 most controversial topics in the English version that would provoke the edit wars included topics such as global warming, circumcision, The United States and even World Wrestling Entertainment employees. The next investigation in line for the researchers is to determine how the controversial topics alter with time.

In cyberspace, for any piece of information being right or credible is not the only prerequisite for it to go down in history as a fact. It needs ample support in numbers as well. Propelling a wave of posts and re-posts, sharing, liking or re-tweeting can simply wash the information away from registering into history or vice versa.

In the cyber space, a lot depends on the masses and how they are being exploited to one’s advantage. Thus, ‘information’ that is contesting to be crowned as ‘knowledge’ now heavily seeks support from the forum users, tweeters and bloggers than anything else. Anyone trying to get access to the same knowledge would then have to settle with what has been democratically approved by the masses as being one, rather than what is correct or right and therefore might even be otherwise.

Information, thus, can be easily manipulated as is the case with information related to political parties, wars, even the corporate sector and multinational giants. It won’t take too long for interested stakeholders, especially within the Third World countries, to pay, sanction and authorise people to go online and deface and manipulate the facts to their liking, just like the good old days of kings and dictators.

Wikipedia, Twitter and other networking forums can be wrongly used for creating the wave of ignorance. Twitter that was initially being trumpeted in our part of the country as a forum to voice the real concerns itself became a victim. More re-tweets somewhat makes one right, regardless of the credibility of the user, the phenomenon which was observed in the recently-concluded elections in Pakistan and pre-election settings. Hence, creating hype and blinding the followers to follow while using false information can now be easily done by simply buying or luring a few bloggers and account users on different forums. In the end, emphasising on quantifying the reliability of the fact rather than looking for the quality itself degrades knowledge into mere information.

So are these forums the true mirror of reality? Are they credible and should they be trusted and even quoted? Faster technology has made the flow of information more accessible but credibility remains a question mark. Other than very basic information that would become general knowledge, every current piece of information is becoming increasingly debatable especially those dealing with sensitive and controversial issues such as war, politics, religion or the foreign policies of a country. The time-tested insight that ‘every piece of information is not knowledge’ is so much pertinent today than it was ever before.

The writer is a health care leader working with a pharmaceutical company.

kalishahid@hotmail.com