Authenticity and the internet

Newsweek reports a trend against user-generated content like Wikipedia. "The expert is back", trumpets the article, citing Google's Knol project and Mahalo as examples of a backlash against the unfiltered crud that so often turns up on the internet.

Wikipedia, needless to say, would have mystified our Ælfric. An information source so ubiquitous and accessible that the majority of the English people (his chosen audience) could read it and publish to it? Sheer lunacy! But what would have struck a chord with Ælfric is the problem of authentication.

The problem with Wikipedia or any other user-generated website is the supreme difficulty of sorting out correct information from lies, inventions and mistakes. If we really want to read something that has a high probability of being reliable, we seek out named authors writing for reputable publications. Ælfric would have done something very similar. Anglo-Saxon prose authors were perennially concerned with authenticating what they wrote. Apart from a very few exceptions, they were writing Christian texts for a people whose Christian tradition was young and unstable, so what they wrote needed to be orthodox and, to some extent, provable.

Some sources of information were considered more authoritative than others. The Bible and the Church Fathers were, of course, practically unimpeachable. Beyond this, hearsay evidence from men of honourable reputation, particularly holy men, was considered perfectly good enough even for what we would now consider quite amazing tales of miracles and wonders. Events that seemed particularly remarkable might draw extra emphasis on authenticating evidence. Ælfric is very keen to prove the virginity of the twice-married St. Æthelthryth not only by recounting the many miracles surrounding her corpse, but also by citing the supporting testimony of St. Wilfrid. (How exactly the holy Wilfrid was supposed to know for sure that Æthelthryth was a virgin, we're never quite told.)

Ælfric's anxiety about the authenticity of his sources was paralleled by anxiety over the authenticity of his own texts, as they were passed on and re-written. Like most writers of the period, he wasn't too concerned about maintaining named authorship of what he wrote. His chief worry was that his message would be adulterated with mistakes. He concluded the preface to his translation of the Biblical book of Genesis by urging, in the name of God, that anyone who copied his work should do so carefully: "much evil is done by an inaccurate scribe if he does not correct his work."

The evils that worried Ælfric were theological ones; an inaccurate translation of the Bible could be a matter literally of life or death for the soul of the reader. It's unlikely that anyone would claim that Wikipedia has the same importance. Nonetheless, access to reliable information remains as much an issue for us as it was for Ælfric. The anxiety and excitement of finding things out is an experience that we share with our medieval ancestors, although in different ways. I have a sneaking hope that an ultimately authoritative source never materialises.