"The Diacritical Mark of the Beast"
Feb. 6th, 2005 10:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
major_clangerOne of the programme items I'm planning to run at Interaction is a critical panel on the impact and implications of collaborative-knowledge projects such as Wikis. A former Britannica editor has made some pointed criticisms of Wikipedia, highlighting the way that it's very easy for bad information to drive out good. I've not yet come up with a firm title for the panel, but I quite like both 'What is the consensus value of pi today' and 'Wikipedia update: Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia', both of which indicate the sort of issues at hand.
Having said all this, there can be no doubt that Wikipedia is a wonderful resource for the out-and-out obscure bits of knowledge where questions of peer review pale beside the fact that there's any scholarship on the matter at all. A superb example is the entry on the Heavy Metal Umlaut (ta to several people who mentioned this one to me in the last week or so). And as a fine example of meta-scholarship, see Jon Udell's narrated movie on the evolution of this page as a case study of wiki scholarship in action.
MC
Having said all this, there can be no doubt that Wikipedia is a wonderful resource for the out-and-out obscure bits of knowledge where questions of peer review pale beside the fact that there's any scholarship on the matter at all. A superb example is the entry on the Heavy Metal Umlaut (ta to several people who mentioned this one to me in the last week or so). And as a fine example of meta-scholarship, see Jon Udell's narrated movie on the evolution of this page as a case study of wiki scholarship in action.
MC
