Crowdsourcing vs Expertsourcing: A Misleading Comparison - SendMeRSS
Posted by elveston priory at 1:44 amThere's a small but pronounced discussion occurring in the blogosphere in response to an article published earlier this past Thursday in Newsweek, authored by Tony Dokoupil. The original article concerns the alleged decline in demand for massively constructed and managed sites and services and the so-called "revenge" or resurgence of tightly organized professional- and expert-driven resources. Some agree with the assessment. Some do not.
I'll go ahead and join the latter group. Not because Dokoupil's contention is baseless. He has a number of interesting positions. For one, I myself can attest to feeling part of a larger collective tired of the growth in nonsense information. (Things that have no meaning, no productive purpose, no justifiable reason for being.)
But the article's author misappropriates the logic of a Web explained in further detail as moving from chaotic to increasingly more intelligible. The rise of smart, and the decline of stupid, in other words. I take issue with the fact that Dokoupil distinguishes specialized projects - BigThink and Mahalo, to name just a couple - from much larger, more voluminous entities, like Wikipedia and YouTube. He purports to find that professionalism and expertise are all but exclusive to websites that place an emphasis on limited editorial discretion (meaning less freedom for users to manipulate data), and he essentially harks on about the inevitable demise of people-power.
Dokoupil's primary problem with aiming his grievances at inventions rather than a number of people using those inventions is that, well…there is really no problem to be found with those inventions. They are, in their most basic form, very useful and very important tools. What's more, those platforms deliver a wide range of data. A much wider range than the data offered by the specialists. Granted, they harbor a mix of good, not-so-good, and even some dreadful, but there's no denying that good material exists. Valuable material. And if you think quantitatively as well as qualitatively, one might even determine that the good on open platforms outnumbers the good on more closed inventions.
That isn't to say that that won't change. Mahalo, to take a lone example, is quite young. In a number of years, it may well be a source many millions of people regularly consult on a day-to-day basis. But the kernel of truth to focus on here is that the "open" experiments have ultimately shown to be quite successful. They've more or less done what they were created to do: collect information created by a potpourri of users, then disseminate said information to an even larger array of users. And they will presumably continue on with that cycle for as long as possible, steadily undergoing algorithmic and parametric refinement.
Dokoupil is correct in saying in effect that Mahalo, BigThink, Google Knol, and even About.com are all in their own right qualitatively useful, functional, and to some percentage of Web users important. But there's no denying the merits of the openness of Wikipedia. There can be no doubt as to the value of YouTube, however disorganized it may be. There's no legitimate claim to be made that openness and groupthink eventually will lead to worthlessness. That point can simply not be substantiated if modern societal ethics are thing we humans still generally adhere to. Not today. Not tomorrow.