'Is Wikipedia part of a new ‘global brain’?' Theresa Clifford, spiked, 14 February 2007

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The internet is often celebrated for giving a voice to anybody and everybody. But in a world of wannabe journalists... it’s worth asking whether these people know more [than the] experts who came before them... News organisations are crying out for ‘citizen journalists’. [Gives examples.] With this proliferation of user-generated content has come the notion of a collective intelligence. [Cites Dan Gillmor.] many in the blogosphere seem fundamentally suspicious of funded or ‘engineered’ content – that is, researched, credible, verified and edited content. [Discusses Nature study of Wikipedia.] Surely the only way of achieving a coherent overview is to invite experts to sift through the barrage of content and judge what is quality and what is not?... It is true that a small proportion of bloggers are authorities in their field or are ‘professional amateurs’. In fact, over 70 per cent of the content on Wikipedia is written by less than two per cent of the total number of contributors... Quoted in The New Yorker... Eric Raymond... argued that ‘the open-source model is inapplicable to an encyclopaedia... There is undoubtedly a role for user-generated content today [however] the new web world can surely only fulfil its true potential through more rigorous standards, frameworks and filters.

• Web Address: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2852/
• Short Name: drerasoyoy
• Short Link: http://ma.gnolia.com/drerasoyoy
• Tags: open source, user-generated content, media industry, self-organisation, it industry
• Saved by Nico Macdonald on March 24, 2007.
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