Meeting of the Mind

US Patent & Trademark Office’s experiment in crowdsourcing:  a noble idea (or political cover by the USPTO) but the number of applications examined is minuscule.

[Something else for the neural net modelers to analyze for us: collaboration is based on trust, and trust starts with credibility . . . although this post is related to the Wikipedia post in this Main category so it's here and not in Collaboration and social neuroscience.]

See BBC news story, and Parallel story in PC World.

The father of the World Wide Web is calling for a system of ratings to help people distinguish truth and untruth online.  The story was carried by Slashdot, and accrued the tag, “goodluckwiththat.”

For discerning or guaranteeing truth of the Web, you have several alternatives to do it by brute force:

• Clamp down and moderate (or restrict “write” access to) everything (also catalog the Web while you’re at it)
• Set up a committee to draw up guidelines
  • There is now Berners-Lee’s new creation, the World Wide Web Foundation (not to be confused with the World Wide Web Consortium which is concerned with more technical matters such as interoperability and accessibility by people with disabilities).
• Invent software to detect and stop gaming (e.g., Google protecting against link farms)

Or you can let the market sort it out

• Educate users to make good choices (or let the underinformed sink or swim on their own)
• Rely somehow on the wisdom of crowds (see gaming, below; or, if you’re lucky, you’re within a self-policing community such as arXiv.org)

Openness has at least two “enemies” (actually destructive elements within):  Wrong or low-quality information misleading or wasting readers’ time;  and gaming the system, i.e., deliberate manipulation.  Can these two be handled the same way?

BUT . . . there is the time-honored technique of considering the source, in this case.  Berners-Lee (at least shortly after the conferral of his knighthood, he discouraged the appellation “Sir Tim” although it’s too fun to resist) is the same one who advocated the Semantic Web (at least at the ASIS&T 2004 annual meeting), which seems a naïve application of META tags.  The original vision of the Web as a communitarian connection of geeks cannot be sustained in its original form any more—Berners-Lee’s ideas seem to be the thoughts of someone grounded in a less-content-oriented, more-technically-oriented experience.  Computer programmers tend to get content nuances right about 80% of the time (think of the balance between domain knowledge and task knowledge following the 80-20 rule), and these ideas may fall into the other 20%, at least for the present time.

[This is the beginning of a thought.]

Colleges (including Middlebury early on, and departments at the University of Texas at Arlington eventually) ban its use for citations.

Our category for encyclopedias (or other traditional reference materials) is that of reliability and no need to question.  Perhaps the name, with that “paideia” root, is the problem–which we might not have if it had been called Askyourneighbor.com or “the wall” in one of the social networking sites.

Wikipedia achieves accuracy the way peer review works:  there’s no absolute standard to measure new discoveries (by definition–they’ve never been known before), so we just run them by a lot of people (granted, different communities may function in different ways) and approach the truth iteratively.

Thus, Wikipedia must be used appropriately.  The problem is not the object, but the process of using it.  It should be used as a journal, not a book.  A book is the culmination of expertise gathering and review.  A journal is a snapshot along the way to a finished more definitive work, i.e., a book.  Everything in Wikipedia is an iteration.

[Thought to be developed, possibly with supporting examples and other rhetorically convincing features.  Finding a true tie-in to neuropsychology would be nice, too--maybe something about the neurotransmitter associated with feelings of certainty?]