[Web4lib] Authority + Wikipedia

[mike at indexdata.com]

> Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 09:36:49 -0500
> From: "Thomale, J" <j.thomale at ttu.edu>
>
> It's a ground-up way (and, IMHO, a backwards way) of thinking about
> truth. It's the modern viewpoint juxtaposed against the postmodern:
> is there objective Truth out there for us to discover? Or do we all
> create our own "truth"?

_Lots_ of good stuff in the messages that I just ruthlessly snipped,
there :-)  Most of it, I don't have time to do justice to in reply.
But I do just want to make a distinction between authoritative and
non-authoritative resources, and ask where authority comes from.

First, what is authoritative?  I hear a lot of criticism of the
WikiPedia on the basis that it's not authoritative; but it seems
absurd to me that anyone could possibly think _any_ encyclopedia is
authoritative.  In my spare time (when I'm not being an Internet
information engineer), I am an academic research in an altogether
unrelated field (dinosaur palaeontology), and I would never even
_consider_ citing an encyclopedia, or using information from one, when
I'm writing for publication.  The role of the encyclopedia (at least
in that field of endeavour) is not really to provide information, but
to provide _pointers_ to (and summaries of) information to be found in
the primary literature.  So, no, I don't consider the WikiPedia to be
authoritative; but neither do I consider Britannica, or Don Glut's
four-volume _Dinosaurs: The Enyclopedia_ to be authoritative.  Surely
that position is not unusual?  Isn't that how everyone works?

Second, then, if primarily literature is authoritative, and
encyclopedias are not, what makes it so?  I'd like to hear others'
ideas about this, but to me the one of the explanations is that it is
a matter of responsibility.  If someone publishes an article in the
Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, their byline is there for all to
see, and any mistakes will reflect badly on the author.  There's
nowhere to hide.  By contrast, encyclopedia articles tend to be
anonymous, or created by committee, so there is no single person
identifiable as responsible for what's written.  No doubt there is
more to it than that, but it's a factor.

By the way, there are other factors that contribute to an article's
citability apart from its availability and perceived authority.  One
is the matter of language.  To pick an example in my own field, by far
the best and most exhaustive anatomical descriptions of brachiosaurid
sauropod dinosaurs are those written by Werner Janensch in the
early-to-mid twentieth century.  However, they are much less often
cited that subsequent palpably inferior offerings -- even though the
later papers are in obscure and hard-to-obtain journals -- because
Janensch wrote in German rather than English.  (Fortunately, in
palaeontology, the pictures are often just as important as the text,
and they are easy to translate :-)

 _/|_	 ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor  <mike at miketaylor.org.uk>  http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "Now, Mrs Yeti-Goosecreature, you've got a very unusual name,
	 haven't you?" / "Yes - It's Simon" -- Monty Python's Flying
	 Circus.