In last night’s talk with MN ISPI on wikis, blogs, etc – the issue of citing Wikipedia as a source came up.
Like citing the 1911 version of Brittanica is the same as citing the current version.
A strawman argument.
One based on false assumptions. Assumptions that established organizations don’t have biases, aren’t infallible, and that knowledge doesn’t change.
As you know, all three are false.
Should a publishing organization be a trusted source simply because they’ve published for a century? The National Enquirer is almost there.
I’ve written before about my issues with newspaper organizations before, and it comes down to trust.
I don’t trust newspaper organizations to regularly publish information relevant to me, while there are great number of websites I do trust.
Part of this comes down to frequency of publication. There are blogs1 that publish when there’s nothing (or nothing more) to say and I have the same issue with them.
The other part is find-ability, share-ability. Both of which are tough in online or hardcopy versions of papers (also in a number of blogs as well).
All of this factors into trusti-ness of a source, not just age.
Perhaps this is me growing weary of ‘journalism‘ framed as Something Special People Do rather than something we all do (or at least can do).
Frankly, in a world of instant publishing, I trust a mass of crazy people working for free much more than organization with a well designed masthead.
Elsewhere:
Sheldon’s entire list is spot on.
1. Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, TechDirt immediately come to mind.
Nicely stated Garrick.