I have a review of Yochai Benkler’s new book up at The Atlantic today. Here’s the gist: Benkler had described and classified the possible motivations driving Wikipedians in his 2006 tome The Wealth of Networks, in which he analyzed the Internet’s impact on the economics of information. In his new book, The Penguin and the Leviathan, Benkler …
Lots of digital ink has been spilled on the trustworthiness of Wikipedia, and the circumstances in which it’s appropriate to use it as a source. Much more interesting, in my view, is the opposite question: what sources does Wikipedia trust? In our age of Truthiness, sorting good information from bad may be more critical than …
The Atlantic tech has a great feature for Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary, featuring thoughts from a number of excellent contributors, including Shirky, Benkler, Zuckerman, Rosen and more. Check it out. One point of interest for me was a contrast in epistemologies offered by novelist Jonathan Lethem and Clay Shirky. Lethem: Question: hadn’t we more or less …