On 24/05/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On 24/05/07, Matthew Brown
<morven(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/23/07, David Gerard
<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I don't really get a great idea of what they MEAN by that phtase,
though ...
It's entirely unclear ... that public participation ruins their
business model? In which case look out for them as a threat in the
future?
I think you're inferring far too much here. This is, really, nothing
at all to do with Microsoft or Google; it's to do with the web and its
users.
The link is talking about a meeting of the UKSG, the United Kingdom
Serials Group, who are a perfectly staid and respectable group of
librarians. It simply so happened that one of the talks was given by a
guy from MS, talking about their products and Google's.
Now, pause for a second. Serials librarians. The context here is
identifying and retrieving information, discussing search tools. Hence
all the statistics abour search groups, content available, etc.
The "Wikipedia problem" - well, talk to half a dozen librarians or
teachers, you'll know exactly what they'd say if you asked what the
"Wikipedia problem" is. It's ubitquitous, it's pervasive, it's not
very good compared to a lot of other stuff out there. It's the same
problem *every other person* who worries about Wikipedia is concerned
with - that peoples behaviour online is to google for something, take
the first result uncritically; if it's something researchable, that
first result is probably served up by us; they'll take it and read it
and never think to check it.
This isn't news. It's the problem we've known about ever since we
became a runaway popular success - we get given far much more
uncritical credence than we deserve, and people are hurting themselves
through it.
Anyone who is willing to take information uncritically off the Internet,
without doing basic cross-checks as to its reliability and provenance,
will have a problem. That's true whether Wikipedia exists or not.
Wikipedia (or for that matter, any encyclopedia) makes a great starting
point for research, but a very poor finishing point for it.