Folks and Experts

Chapter Eight - Folks and Experts: Notes

What is the role of traditional experts in the folksonomic created knowledge? Do bona fide experts need to re-earn their status?

Two different systems: the expert paradigm (universally accepted, internally consistent; folksonomic paradisgm (multiplicity, conflicts of interpretation, alternative representations accepted by a subset of a community)

Opponents of folksonomies: something can’t have credibility without the oversight of experts.

Problems with this view: prevents community from developing organically with its own procedures. Also, how are experts recognized? Also, where is the line between pros and ams? It is more on a continuum.

Establishing policies to define experts goes against the “fluidity” and heterarchy pillars of produsage. It would be too hard to manage. More realistic to rely on the community to identify expert status. This would be based more on contribution and less on credential as well. Also, produsage does have rules: Verifiability and no Original Research.

Citizendum is as vulnerable to systemic shortcomings inherent in its hierarchy as Wikipedia is to abuse from ad hoc or a posteriori processes of governance.

One solution – open entry this is universally writable with a section vetted by experts, and providing citations of those experts. This would only be in keeping with produsage if there were no restrictions on entries.

Shirky – You need barriers to participation. But not in the traditional sense, more based on contributions and gauged by the community.

Risk: “It can still seem as though the user who spends the most time on the site – or who yells the loudest wins.” Squeaky wheel syndrome just like in the non eworld.

People must be responsible in making contributions: the responsibility to ensure that contributions are made only where individuals have a reasonable indication that their contribution will be constructive and useful to the common aim. Page 113

How many subjects are non-experts truly unable to make any contributions of value? Scientific facts are a minute component of the wider range of human knowledge. Most other fields are more open to interpretation, discussion, and debate.