Information Distortion

Posted on July 6, 2006
Filed Under Channels and Content, Error and bias |

The world of co-created knowledge is of course the way forward but here are a few observations for anyone in training for a rigorous analysis of wikis, blogs and news sites like newsvine.

A week ago I was up making changes to part of Wikipedia. Why? Because an area there looked to me to overclaim for one of the authors cited repeatedly through the entry. I added a couple of pars that introduced doubt and reservation.

Hardly before I had time to effect the changes than my pars were deleted. I made the changes again later and again they were deleted. I gave up. Now this is real knowledge management, on the fly. I’m a great fan of Wikipedia but if you have somebody fanatical enough about an entry, you won’t be effecting change unless you too are fanatical.

My guess is the same will be true of any Wiki, on either side of the corporate firewall. It raises an important question about the democratisation of knowledge. Whereas we used to leave it to our chosen authorities to argue the fine points of a knowledge base in university seminars and academic books, we may in future have to fight it out on the web, ad infinitum.

Take too the distorting effects of Google. I know I need to get the word IPTV into this entry in order to maintain my Google ad sense sidebar in the IPTV domain. Without a mention for IPTV Google Ad Sense will slip into a generic form, advertising blogs and dating sites.

Or the technorati phenomenon. How many people blog about a subject because they see it on top of the technorati bloging tags list? Blog on technorati’s top ten and you’re guaranteed a few minutes on Technorati’s search returns list.

Look again at Newsvine. the top entries relate to the concerns of a particular area of American foreign policy. Gaza, Hamas. Or domestic controversy: Rumsfeld, Presidential elections. Why, you want to ask, is it following the conventional news agenda? Because Associated press is the main news source? Or because it attracts people who have an interest in the news agenda?

These are all ways that the aura of what we know are influenced by our new means of communication. Well worth an acaedmic taking an interest and documenting, I would say.

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