Simon Says
August 16th, 2004Simon puts his thoughts down on social software:
“I made my first contribution to Wikipedia a few days ago. What’s interesting to me is the whole notion of group accountability. The traditional approach to creating and organising knowledge assumes that this should be the task of experts - and this is what we’re taught in library school - when we evaluate resources we look to the credibility of the author/editor/publisher. Now Wikipedia challenges that - it’s not “organised”, and contributions are made by anonymous posters, who could be anybody. Yet it works. Sure, anyone could edit a record to reflect a partisan agenda, or as a prank. But dozens of other people would correct it. A self-correcting system.”
I’m not sure about wikis yet, but I do know that they can have some sort of place in the library environment. I don’t know where, but the concept intrigues me. A “self correcting system” seems right, as the group outweighs the individual for competent information dissemination, but I wonder what happens when the entire group is misinformed…