Everything Old is New Again

I’m always amused to find stories that indicate that for all of the talk of tradition, learning from the past, and trying not to repeat the mistakes of previous generations, no one can actually remember anything and the same old mistakes keep right on being made. There’s a lot of that going on in the news right now, since it’s a Presidential election year in the US, and a lot of the usual empty promises are being thrown around, but there was a story in the news this week that confirmed my belief that follies of this type are not limited to Americans, let alone American politicians. Apparently, some folks in Canada are trying to revive the Avro Arrow project of 1958…

You can find the original story on the Toronto Star website if you want to, but for anyone who isn’t particularly interested in the history of aircraft, the Arrow was a supersonic interceptor designed by Avro Canada during the Cold War as a counter-measure to Soviet strike aircraft attacking over the North Pole. Similar in concept (if not entirely in design) to the Convair delta-wing interceptors of the same era (the F-102 and F-106), the Arrow was an impressive piece of technology that would have equaled or exceeded the performance of all contemporary aircraft and would not have found a worthy opponent in Soviet service until the arrival of the Tupolev Tu-22 “Backfire” bomber nearly two decades later. However, like any other piece of cutting-edge technology, building a fleet of Arrows and working the bugs out of them would have been an expensive undertaking, and the Canadians elected to purchase a fleet of McDonnell-Douglas F-101s instead…

In most respects, that choice worked out very well for the Canadian Air Force. The F-101 turned out to be ideal for Canadian defensive requirements, and its adaptability for high-speed air-to-ground and very high-speed recon missions could only have been a plus. The downside – purchasing defense equipment from a foreign source, stunting the domestic aerospace industry’s growth in defense (and particularly supersonic) programs, and outsourcing all of the jobs involved to the US – remained a source of bitter contention for some years thereafter, but the loss of the actual aircraft doesn’t seem to have harmed the country or its national defense. It was a bit surprising to find a story about reviving the program as an alternative to the F-35 Lightning II turning up on one of the news aggregation sites…

Up until now, Canada has been one of the members of a constantly-shifting group of nations who intend to purchase the F-35, originally known as the Joint Strike Fighter, along with the United States Air Force. As with the F-16, F-18, F-15, F-5, F-111, F-101, F-104, C-130, A-4 and far too many other designs to bore you with, this arrangement should make it possible for a whole range of countries friendly to the US (or at least hostile to people we don’t like) to purchase cutting-edge war planes that they could never afford to develop on their own, while at the same time helping the American companies that produce the airplane to recover the cost of their R&D efforts and make more money into the bargain. Unfortunately, the F-35 has been delayed by technical problems, plagued by cost over-runs, and has thus far failed to live up to all but the most basic claims made for it – which is making it easy for people in Canada who oppose the project to come up with alternate suggestions. It’s just that this one was loony enough to raise eyebrows in anyone who has ever studied aircraft, history, or business…

For its time, the Arrow was a remarkable piece of engineering, and could have proved useful as a counter-measure to Cold War-era long-range strikes. But reviving the program now would mean producing a machine designed before the parents of most of its pilots were born to perform a mission long since made obsolete against an enemy who no longer exists. As an appeal to nationalists, voters who don’t particularly like Americans, or the Canadian domestic aerospace industry, this stunt might make sense from a political standpoint. And there is some precedent for it – the US has revived the U-2 and SR-71 aircraft for service, if not new construction. But the Arrow was cancelled in 1958 because it didn’t make military or economic sense, and today it represents more of a point of national pride than anything anyone would actually want to take into battle…

That doesn’t mean that someone won’t try it, however…

The Ethics of Wikipedia

Anyone who works in Education at any level has probably got a few stories to tell you about students using Wikipedia as the primary source – or occasionally the only source – of information on a report or writing assignment, even though the site’s occasional issues with the truth are widely known. The editorial board does its best, but given the number of volunteers contributing to Wikipedia there will inevitably be cases where personal bias of a political, philosophical, religious, scientific or spiteful nature results in errors being accepted or retained as correct. This has resulted in some embarrassing – and potentially actionable – mistakes, and has come close to knocking the site off the Internet more than once…

Probably the most outrageous of these errors are the cases where an artist or scientist is denied permission to edit the entry about his or her own work, on the grounds that they are not a credible source on things they have created. This came up again this past week, when American author Phillip Roth was told that Wikipedia did not consider him a credible source regarding the origins of a book he had actually written. Roth responded with an open letter about this fiasco in the New Yorker, and somebody was apparently willing to accept that article as a second confirmation of story – possibly because the magazine would have hesitated to run the open letter if the allegations it contained were not verified – because the Wikipedia entry has been corrected…

Now, the point has been made several times that this policy isn’t as farcical as it sounds. Without some kind of independent fact-checking there would be nothing to keep a discredited scientist from changing the facts of a Wikipedia entry to indicate that his theory had been right all along, for example. We’ve already seen cases of political parties and candidates altering both their own entries and ones about their opponents in order to improve their chances of election, and there’d certainly be no reason to suppose that authors, filmmakers or commercial firms wouldn’t alter information about themselves in order to increase sales, regardless of the truth or falsehood involved. Unfortunately, there have also been cases where one or more Wikipedia editors have allowed their own personal biases to cloud their judgment, resulting in citations of scientific research being deleted in order to uphold a personal or political point…

Clearly, Wikipedia has a responsibility (legal and ethical) to try to present the most accurate information available, especially because despite all evidence to the contrary, people at all levels of age and education are going to take what they read on the site as absolutely correct. In cases where scientific fact is in question, or the details of an event (public or private) are in dispute, it’s hard to argue that a second (or third) source of confirmation is a bad thing. But when an artist presents his or her actual thoughts about a work, or a scientist provides his or her actual data and calculations, it’s even more difficult to say that an editor who can’t possibly have an understanding of that work that approaches that of the person who created it should have the authority to override (or delete) the opinions of the creator. This leads me to an ethical question that is not as simple as it initially appears:

Does Wikipedia (or any other online source) have an ethical responsibility to allow the creator of a specific work of art or research to have the final say on the meaning and interpretation of his or her own work? If so, how are they to prevent edits made for self-serving purposes, and particularly ones that intentionally distort the facts? If not, how are they to prevent edits that directly contradict not only the original work but also the creator’s efforts to correct the entry? In the case of any disputed fact the editors could certainly request third-party confirmation of basic facts, but this will almost certainly result in cases where the editors and their subject matter are at odds with yet another set of bias and belief. Or should the site allow all information that isn’t directly contradicted by other available sources to be entered, possibly with notations where the disputes occur, and allow visitors to the site to make their own decisions?

It’s worth thinking about…