Kommentare zu: Google-Wikipedia-Connection and the decay of academia

Von: Milwaukee SEO

Milwaukee SEO — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 01:38:30 +0000

Back in elementary school 30 years ago, I remember being told to create research papers without the use of an encyclopedia, and that our papers would be given poorer grades if it was discovered that we did. While an encyclopedia, even Wikipedia, offer great generalized content, they certainly do offer a lazy way to conduct research. I’ve found many instances of excellent Web resources who refuted topics or questions the accuracy of information found in Wikipedia.

Von: InfoWissBlog Saarbrücken

InfoWissBlog Saarbrücken — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 10:31:48 +0000

Wikipedia, Wikipedia…

Im Moment ist die Wikipedia ja mal wieder in aller Munde:
Zum einen durch die “Vergleichstudie” des Stern in der die schon bekannte Tatsache bestätigt wird (cf. den Artikel des leider schon verstorbenen Roy Rosenzweig oder auch den Artike…

Von: AndreasPraefcke

AndreasPraefcke — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:09:29 +0000

“Everybody can type a word or a phrase into a search engine” is a classical mistake: while both public opinion and search engine marketing suggest that this is true, it’s simply not.

Knowing how to search is still crucial, and I bet I can produce much better Google results to virtually any given question than someone without much experience in googling: by knowing which terms to search, which phrases to use, what to exclude, etc.

Next, an experienced researcher would know which search engines to use (or at least, which Google parts will be of help: Google Book Search or even Google Maps are often very helpful). Besides, everyone writing about search engines should at least have heard of the term “deep web”.

Taking all that into account, it’s clear that not everybody can type a word into a search engine and produce a paper any more than one could produce a paper from looking a key term up in a printed encyclopedia (or library catalouge, for that). The situation is very similar to different levels if traditional researching capabilities. I venture a guess that Maurer simply does not know how to do a web search well enough to see that.

Von: Lambert

Lambert — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 09:30:58 +0000

Hi Jakob, thank you for this fine article, which I agree on in great parts! Perhaps except for the last paragraph: I think you underestimate the culture of personal authorship in academia.
I want to expand on this, and why I think this is important to us.
Most authors want and (at least until today) depend on being the single accountable person for what they have written, identifiable by their name. It’s really great to see that Wikipedia grew so far despite this fact, and perhaps this is not at least because of Wikipedia’s proven ability to grow an own culture of debate, mutual review, accountability through use of real names or pseudonyms and so on. But obviously, a whole lot of authors still feel uncomfortable writing in a public wiki, where virtually anyone anytime may alter their text. They simply don’t want to be contributors to a collective work result, even if such a result would be better than their own one, and even if their own contributions can be clearly identified. Maybe sometimes there will be a greater transition away from this culture, but I think in the meantime we have to deal with it. By which I mean that we, as librarians, will have to support single authors (and closed groups of authors) with tools and strategies to create and to provide their own works to the community.
Btw: Your weblog is a nice example that those single-author-tools and -strategies work, and that they have their meaningful place in the web’s communication landscape.