[Web4lib] Authority + Wikipedia

[Peter Morville]

That's an excellent clarification. Thanks Jason. Of course, I worry that
librarians will have a hard time reaching more than a small percentage of
the population with this message. What I'd like to see is greater
information literacy on a large scale. Perhaps our K-12 system will help.
Perhaps the Web will help. Either way, if more people are better able to
evaluate and select trustworthy sources, the gap between popularity and
quality will grow smaller. Over the long haul, I'm not convinced that we
can't trust "we the people" to select authoritative sources, to a degree.
After all, we trust them to select our leaders and our president, to a
degree.


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



-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Thomale, J
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2005 4:15 PM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: RE: [Web4lib] Authority + Wikipedia

> 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.

Despite this link between findability and [perceived] authority, I think
Karen's point is that this is (or should be) a distressing development
for librarians. Just because a document is findable, this does not mean
that its contents are *better* or more truthful than a document that is
not findable. That scholarly research cites more freely available online
articles just because they are freely available online is a commentary
on human nature and the state of scholarly research--but it should not
be a prescription for the library community.

In objective terms, the findability of a document does not influence the
quality of its information. As librarians, we are supposed to be experts
on helping people find and retrieve quality information. Another way to
say this is that we are supposed to be experts on helping people find
and retrieve *authoritative* information. If we change our traditional
definition of "authority" to match this constructivist definition of
authority, then we are essentially equating quality with availability
and (ultimately) popularity.

I think your article is pretty clear that this definition of authority
is not desirable for librarians. But, in general, I think we should
tread carefully this line between what *is* happening to information on
the web and what *should* be happening, lest the theoretical
underpinnings upon which librarianship is based be yanked out from under
us.

Jason Thomale
Metadata Librarian
Texas Tech University Libraries

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