Online communities, tags, authority and reputation

For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things … and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture.

Francis Bacon (? 1603, De interpretatione naturæ prœmium)

Famous lines, which came to mind as I read the various, recent contributions to the discussion about the reliability/authority of Wikipedia, springing from Alex Halavais' experiment. Matt Jones is clearly right to have made the distinction between reliability-as-a-piece-of-self-repairing-software and reliability-as-authoritative (see his posting, Confusing Authority and Autonomy). Halavais' experiment showed that Wikipedia certainly can display the former, though Edward Felten yesterday posted about a contrary example. Dave Winer's timely observation is also important:

I find that on some subjects that I have expertise on, it does a remarkably good job, better than most professional journalists. But on other subjects, it only represents one point of view. When others try to balance it, their notes are deleted. This is the inherent weakness in the Wiki model, the consensus isn't always correct, esp when some people want to have their point of view prevail above all others. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

(Echoes of Elizabeth Anscombe on the tyranny of the majority.)

How collaborative sites might order themselves most effectively is a question at the heart of all social software beyond the completely trivial: the debate at Flickr about tagging, and the on-going discussion within the del.icio.us community about the same, suggest that such communities need members who are prepared to discuss, hammer out and live within certain frameworks. Furthermore, 'The core issue of collaborative editing, that of accuracy and trust, has reached a point in debate where research is needed to advance the practice of content use and development' (Ross Mayfield).

Online communities are institutions in their own right and, like all institutions, will go through sea-changes, now too restrictive, now too loose in their agreement as to what is considered authoritative, useful ... Too much order and interesting questions don't get a chance to surface, and order itself can all too quickly come to be identified with authority. ('Regimentation and education are incompatible': Gerald Vann.) But 'the lack of hierarchy, synonym control and semantic precision' (Gene Smith) in what Thomas Vander Wal has called a 'folksonomy' , a lack that Stewart Butterfield (of Flickr) celebrates (this is 'precisely why it works'), lends weight to Peter Merholz's remarks:

The practice of tagging on del.icio.us works because, at its heart, it's meant for the use of the individual doing the tagging. The fact that it contributes to the group is a happy by-product... But as a tool for group tagging, it's woefully insufficient. Del.icio.us has a very low findability quotient. It's great for serendipity and browsing, and an utter disaster for anything targeted.

(Joshua's generous comment to this posting: 'I'm really only getting started on del.icio.us and will be adding a lot more to enhance findability and discovery. I'll be adding a bunch of magic to tie all the different bundles of related terms together. Each user should use whatever they feel they are most comfortable with and I will do the rest behind the scenes.')

My final thoughts have been put best by Collin Brooke:

... credibility is something you earn and develop, not something you simply have. When we ask our students to do research and to prepare the results in written form, we are teaching them to earn credibility through breadth and depth of research. You don't earn credibility by citing an "authoritative source," whatever that means. You earn it by testing your sources against one another, understanding what the reasons are for differences of opinion, and figuring out how to resolve them or to choose among positions, etc. In other words, authority should be something that each of us assigns to our sources, not the other way around. It is the result of research, not a prerequisite.

That's what I'd say to those who criticise Wikipedia and refer students instead to a printed text. No one text, printed or otherwise, has the last word. No text is "authority". And then there's Bacon, up there, ahead of us — an ideal we stumble after ...