[Web4lib] The Wikipedia Gotcha

[Will Kurt]

At 10:35 AM 2/21/2007, Roy Tennant wrote:
>They are, in a very real
>sense, putting their reputations and the reputations of their institutions
>on the line that what appears in the journal is worthy to appear there

I think people too easily underestimate the ability of scholarly 
journals to be just as petty regarding reputation as any online 
forum.  Alan Sokal's hoax submission to 'Social Text' is about 
ridiculous/childish as any 'flame wars' that go on in internet 
communities.  And it's not just that incident either.  Recently  a 
research project I did for a user focused on some of Donald Foster's 
work in 'Computers and the Humanities', during which I uncovered what 
essentially was years worth of scholarly name-calling between Foster 
and two other researchers Elliot and Valenza. Yes, there was some 
real research behind all of it, but dialog itself was far from 
serious scholarly communication (and I do think much the seriousness 
of the research could also be questioned).

Likewise I think people underestimate how seriously many online 
contributors take their reputations, pseudonymous or not.  Being in 
the top 1% of Digg users is a big deal, and this similar in any other 
dynamic online community.  Just because online reputation rarely 
translates to academic doesn't mean it isn't just as valuable.

For a similar case just look at the hacker community, reputation is 
very important despite a culture that exists entirely 
pseudonymously.  And there's one online culture that often does 
translate directly from pseudonymous to mainstream/real world reputations.

There is such a thing as pseudonymous accountability, and I would 
actually argue it is stronger because of the potential for 
abuse.  Reputations online can be harder to build and easier to damage.