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March 14, 2008, 02:15 PM ET
Experts vs. Amateurs on the Web
The credibility war rages on in the world of Web 2.0.
Those who say information provided by Internet research tools needs to be vetted have made their case in several ways.
Knol, for example, appears to be Google’s answer to Wikipedia. And for now, while the project is under development, authors can contribute content by invitation only. The plan is to let users rank the wheat among the chaff; the highest-ranking articles would pop up first in a Google search.
A clear example is Mahalo. It’s essentially a search engine run by staff members, who hand-pick links for popular search terms. That’s a familiar concept for academic libraries.
There is resistance to the idea that experts have lost their place in the indiscriminate, user-generated Web 2.0. John Connell, an education-business manager at Cisco Systems, writes in his blog that experts and laymen can coexist on the Web:
“We are not dealing with a zero-sum game of any kind — the rise of one source of information does not (necessarily) cause the dissipation of another. Why then do those who espouse the ‘cult of the expert,’ for want of a better term, feel it necessary not just to have access to the authoritative information (in their terms) that they seek, but to deny those who want access to the … trivial information they want?
“It is elitism, pure and simple.”
The question is, do users need someone else to filter information for them? We know from past reports that the
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