The publishing/media industry has been a traditional partner with academia. As a member of the media on the public side now, and formerly on the corporate side exclusively, I know that the publishers have had a monopoly and amassed large fortunes due to academic publishing. Universities can now be full fledged publishers with online publishing and contain the costs and reap some of the profits. -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Bonnie Nardi Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2006 12:00 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] Trusted Wikipedia Mary Bryson raises many important points. Why indeed are we trying to tame this miracle? We already have scads of academic journals. They aren't going away, they have enormous value, but they don't have to be the only game in town. On the let a thousand flowers bloom theory, Wikipedia is its own wonderful jungle/garden/wildspace. I like the freedom writers have to write there without worrying about what an expert thinks. The funnel is narrowed when a small handful of experts begins to exert control and shape the writing. Wikipedia is one source among many. It is what it is, and what it is is unique and has value. In my experience, today's students are immersed in the Internet and they won't skip over Wikipedia just because a teacher tells them it's not reliable. The problem is more likely to be that they rely only on Wikipedia and don't dig deeper, even when Wikipedia tells them where to dig. Mary's points re McLuhan and Arendt are very well taken. -- Bonnie Bonnie A. Nardi School of Information and Computer Sciences University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3425 (949) 824-6534 www.artifex.org/~bonnie/ On Sep 21, 2006, at 8:00 AM, Mary K. Bryson wrote:
On 9/20/06 7:45 PM, "Alex Halavais" <halavais@gmail.com> wrote:
To do this, we need to assemble a group of people who have some level
of recognition in the field, and who are willing to devote a small amount of time to helping to select a core set of articles and oversee the review process. While we will be looking at a number of ways to make this process more technologically easy, the key issue here is to find a group of people willing to invest a little time and
their reputations in an effort to make Wikipedia a more trusted source.
"Recognition" is such a complicated construct. How to fashion a version of "recognition" that would make sense within the unique version of constraints that operate in Wikipedia would be a productive
educational activity. It would be productive of something that would, in all likelihood, stage a return to some notion of "verifiable expertise". It's just so hard to avoid a return to the repressed. What, exactly, is the problem with
Wikipedia, anyway, really? And I mean "problem" from a scholarly perspective. Here we have an enactment of Hannah Arendt's observation that when there is genuine novelty it always appears rather miraculous, and we want to bring a novel artifact back into line with what it replaced, against all odds - something like - an academic journal? Why? Who doesn't trust Wikipedia, and who wants to trust its contents, and what is it to have a relation of "trust" with knowledge, anyway? What kind of knowledge is it that improves in its value because we stand before it in a relation of "trust"? The latter is probably easy enough to answer at the level of the everyday - as in
-- "Well if I'm going in for open-heart surgery I want the person with
the scalpel to know a little more than what you could find in a Wikipedia article." But outside of that realm of instrumental knowledge, literally, who is a "trusted source" and with what are they entrusted, and by whom? It's good to keep in mind what McLuhan observed about the contents of a new medium invariably being that of what it replaced... Maybe we can't help but experience anxiety that this odd site seems kind of like an encyclopedia, but is different. However, our relation to that anxiety can also be productive of the insight that we might not need to move to enact a strategy of repair.
Mary --------------- Dr. Mary K. Bryson, Associate Professor and Director, Graduate Programs, ECPS, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia http://educ.ubc.ca/faculty/bryson/cv.html Research Profile http://www.ecps.educ.ubc.ca/research/mbryson.htm
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