Andrew Gray wrote:
On 24/05/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 24/05/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/23/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://liveserials.blogspot.com/2007/05/uksg-write-up-wikipedia-problem.html
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.