Expertise -- recognizing when a blogger (or anyone, for that matter) has some -- is a theme that I mentioned in my very first post, Greetings from the Mothership. The standard for expertise these days is Wikipedia and it is an excellent example of what some disciplines recognized as aggregate knowledge or "the knowledge of groups". Wikipedia is -- generally speaking -- a good source of information because the people behind the scenes are committed and diligent. There was a run-off between Wikipedia and Britannica.com documented in Nature (Internet encyclopaedias go head to head) that indicated that Wikipedia, based on the expertise of the masses, was just as good if not better a resource as Britannica.
The flaw here? Well, there are several. One was posted by Jeremy Stafford-Deitsch in the SSE Yahoo message board:
'Wikipedia, with its millions of amateur editors and unreliable content, is the 17th most trafficked site on the net. Britannica.com, a subscription-based service with 100 Nobel prize-winning contributors and more than 4,000 other experts is ranked 5,128...'
As the article suggest - not entirely tongue-in-cheek - if enough Wikipedia people decide that 2 + 2 = 5 then, according to Wikipedia, so be it.
A follow up post noted that Britannica is subscription based and Wikipedia is not, therefore the explanation of the traffic differences.
A lot of the conversations in the NextStage offices deal with recognizing "expertise". A recent heated conversation had to do with recognizing who the experts were regarding global warming/climate change/isn't the weather funny these days?
We have people who are recognized as having advanced knowledge of several fields here. I don't know if anybody would consider themselves experts. I know I don't consider myself an expert, merely an explorer. Niels Bohr said, "An expert is a person who's made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."
Either our field isn't narrow enough or we haven't run out of mistakes to make yet.
My posts often quote sources such as Nature, Science, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Cybernetics & Human Knowing and the bibliographies I've listed might demonstrate that we read and study fairly extensively in a wide variety of disciplines. However, I often acknowledge and present on the fact that science is simply another form of belief and is only accurate within the current paradigm of understanding. Most people no longer believe the earth is flat although that was the best science available in its day.
Umm...wait a second...that flat earth thing was basically the Wikipedia of the day. There was evidence that the earth was round, it was ignored.
By the masses.
But my statement that science is nothing more than concensus with numbers is still valid.
One of my favorite information sources these days is EarthPortal and I have high hopes for the Encyclopedia of Life. Check them out.
Anyway, mistakes, the making of them and the recognition of expertise are greatly on my mind this week.
Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.
Upcoming Trainings:
Upcoming Conferences:- DC Emetrics Summit on 14-17 Oct '07
- Society for New Communications Research Annual Research Symposium & Awards Gala on 5-6 Dec 07 in Boston.
» Have you met Eris? You might have known her as Xena from BizMediaScience
Of Planets, Dwarf-Planets and the Destruction of Myths [Read More]
Tracked on: February 19, 2008 8:54 AM | Permalink to Trackback