[WEB4LIB] Re: Seeing ourselves as others see us

[Jennifer A. Heise]

Larry brings up a good point:

>Not to get all postmodern or anything, but what I find most interesting 
>about the wikipedia as a web phenomenon is the way in which it affects 
>the whole idea/ideal of "authority" and "expertise". We all know enough 
>to smile at the naivete of those who would cite a newspaper or a TV 
>report as evidence of a "fact" (even though such media are screened and 
>edited), but have we occasionally been a little simplistic ourselves, in 
>info-literacy classes for example, in holding up sources like 
>encyclopedias and peer-reviewed journals as guarantors of fact or truth? 
>That is, perhaps the wikipedia isn't so much imitating the authority of 
>the encyclopedia but rather inducing a more critical awareness of the 
>nature and limits of "authority" as such.
>  
>
I belong to a historical group with an interest in cooking. For a while, 
there was a great reaction against the academy in this group's research 
because a number of old memes had been promulgated to most historians, 
the most pungent of which was the idea that medieval and Renaissance 
people spiced their meat heavily to conceal the flavor of spoilage/rot. 
This meme had been promulgated in influential books and in college 
classrooms well up into the 1970s, and Oxford University Press recently 
(1990's) published a children's book making use of the idea. So, there 
are sometimes disadvantages to our definitions of authority, though 
those may be of more use than not in most cases.

I think there is a place in the reference world for references created 
by cooperatives of people who share a common goal, and who peer-review 
each other, even if they do not hold the credentials of the 
publishing/academic world. But then, I'm part of a number of communities 
dedicated to such information sharing.

-- Jenne Heise