[Web4lib] The Wikipedia Gotcha
Will Kurt
wkurt at bbn.com
Wed Feb 21 11:03:26 EST 2007
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.
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