Friday, August 31, 2007

Authority and Authorship

The other night in class, we were discussing how Web 2.0 may be changing our understanding of what authority is. This is an intriguing question to me, and I don't have any good answers yet. That means that I continue to ponder points I come across, such as this one. What an interesting process to guage and represent trust. Look especially at how the author's reputation is established. What do you think?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think that the “Author Reputation” is interesting on Wikipedia because it really is affected by if other readers agree/disagree with you as well as if you know the information.

For example, if there were two people who had differing views about a subject and they continued to add their own comments and delete the other comments, both of them would have an untrustworthy reputation. And is there any other way to raise your reliability meter (my word here) other than just having your information remain untouched for a lengthy amount of time? I would be extremely nervous to post (even something that I felt 100% confident about) in the chance that someone may disagree or be incorrect and it would therefore deter from my reliability. I wonder if others share this fear? How will this affect the knowledge on the site?