http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2007/08/tt_you_meet_the_nicest_people.html

and here:

http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2007/08/tt_just_in_case_you_were_wonde_6.html

-Steve

I recently completed a Masters of Library Science via Texas Womans University. Folks in Library & Information Science have produced a lot of great resources including really excellent guides to evaluating web resources.

What I found disturbing was that even some of the faculty treated the Web as inherently untrustworthy until evaluated while treating traditional print resources as inherently trustworthy.

The Web’s giving us an opportunity to forefront how we evaluate resources but I’m generally surprised at how folks don’t make the connections back to evaluating print or other resources associated with mainstream media. I’m especially disappointed that this moment in which problems with verifying online information are in the forefront is not being used as a larger teaching opportunity regarding resource evaluation.

I dig the NY Times but take any topic you know well and follow it there regularly and it’s amazing how much nonsense makes it into that resource.

On that note, I worked with an educator who was surprised at some news I shared and asked me where I got it. When I said “on the Internet”, she went “Ohhhh” in a knowing way as if that explained why it sounded so nuts. When I followed with, “on the NY Times website,” she just got quiet.

Both responses were rather sad.

“The average newspaper should expand by a factor of 50 the amount of space given to corrections if Scott R. Maier’s research is any guide.

Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, describes in a forthcoming research paper his findings that fewer than 2 percent of factually flawed articles are corrected at dailies.”

Maybe if these papers incorporated some sort of wiki….

-Steve

This quote originally appeared in Gordon R. Dickson’s novel Tactics of Mistake (Gordie apparently preferred his name to be conventionally capitalized, and when writing professionally, included his middle initial, followed by a period.)

To my mind, the sentiment applies well to the present conflict. To users and creators of sites which feature socially created content, they indeed appear “mighty and enduring”. But danah, and others of her ilk are truly the “sage amongst [her] books”. Viewed analytically, Wikipedia is merely one experiment among many which litter the modern Internet landscape. If they do not find a way to repair the flaws in their process, they will end up in the dumpster of history. But perhaps others will have learned from their mistakes.

Just a thought,
-Steve

Okay, the first part is empty-headed prejudice, but the second part is not a bad description, in some ways, of at least an aspect of social networking.

First, let me apologize if the increased traffic on the discussion page for that article has caused you any distress, because it’s largely my fault for having been naive enough to wander in, wonder why they were capitalizing your name, and try to argue for the change.

The past month or so has been an “interesting” experience for me, let’s put it that way. I understand where Kat’s coming from, but after being on the receiving end of the 9-on-1 “all hail the holy NYT” gangbang that was the discussion of whether the article on danah should capitalize her name, I hope I’ll be forgiven for being somewhat disillusioned.

The good news is that nothing’s ever final on Wikipedia, that articles can be edited (most of the time, by most people) and that there are processes in place for amending the policies and guidelines; in fact, I posted a proposal recently to amend the style guide to explicitly allow lower-case names, since there’s more than one article where that’s a problem.

But the bad news is that Wikipedia is extremely friendly to cliques and echo chambers and makes it easy for them to obtain disproportionate levels of power: relatively small groups of like-minded people can declare themselves to be a “consensus”, and God help whoever gets in their way (I lost track of how many times I was threatened by one Wikipedia admin during that debate).

And really, I think that’s more problematic than fetishizing mainstream media; it’s usually possible to cite sources with more authority than general media, and typically those sources will “win” a given debate, but against a determined clique with strong opinions, there’s little to no hope; there will inevitably be a moment where there are enough of them arguing the same thing at the same time to get it declared a “consensus” and shut down any opposition.

I’m still trying valiantly to employ the principle of charity, though…

Fred Saberhagen is Dead, But Not On Wikipedia