Homework 2: "The Phenomenology of Error"

What Williams means by errors are a “social construct” is that everyone makes them, along with the fact that not everyone will recognize them when they occur. If they are recognized, they will either be reacted upon, or ignored. In all the examples he gives about how grammarian's state a rule of grammar and then immediately break said rule just shows how it's part of our writing systems. Throughout the article, I kept having a feeling like something was wrong with a sentence, but I couldn't put my finger on it. When I got to the end and was told there were about 100 errors, it just proved his entire point of ignoring errors. Unless we read everything closely down to the letter, our minds just make the errors fade into the background and make it seem like it's not there. If we don't recognize it, we believe it to be correct.I believe this relates to Wikipedia's reputation of being error-prone because of how available it is to everyone: to read or to edit. Since it's possible that someone who wrote a serious article can be edited by someone else and have the entire article read “Nipples and broccoli”, I believe other teachers fear that if students get their information from there. It might be a stigma that the errors will be more subtle and students won't catch it until they get the grade back on the paper written.

Even with research, I don't think it matters to many readers. An “Encyclopedia”, more or less Britannica (which is probably the most well known encyclopedia), is supposed to represent this tome of all sorts of wisdom, correct down to the final punctuation. Wikipedia, on the other hand, has that everlasting stigma of “everyone can edit posts”. This leads to some being skeptical about the correctness or reliability of an article. I'm not sure about if William's article can help with this particular problem though. True enough, the mistake ratio between Britannica and Wikipedia are almost dead even, but I believe it's the vandalism possibility of Wikipedia is the reason for the skeptics to criticize. Britannica isn't prone to obvious vandalism, therefore it's given a better reputation.