[Web4lib] Authority + Wikipedia

[Peter Morville]

Thanks for surfacing this important point Karen. Information that's hard to
find will remain information that's hardly found. And, as evidence-based
studies have shown (see below), even within the realm of scholarly research,
articles that are freely available online, and therefore more findable, are
much more highly cited...which to me, suggests an important link between
findability and authority. The scholarly researchers that are most commonly
cited tend to have the most authority within academia.

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/kaantelm/do_open_access_CRL.pdf

Cheers!


Peter Morville
President, Semantic Studios
http://semanticstudios.com
http://findability.org



-----Original Message-----
From: Karen Coyle [mailto:kcoyle at kcoyle.net] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2005 12:20 PM
To: Peter Morville
Cc: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: Re: [Web4lib] Authority + Wikipedia

Peter, thanks.

What jumps out at me here is not the concept of "authority" but of 
"findability." The information that people use is the information that 
they find, and knowing human nature, it's the information that they find 
most easily. In 1984 or so, the U of California MELVYL catalog put up 
its first A&I database online -- Medline...