Connecting the Dots

We were asked to look at the Wikipedia articles of several of the concepts we covered in this course and share our impressions and comments about them. The following is my expressed opinion and not necessarily endorsed by my school, place of employment or colleagues.

I conducted several searches using Wikipedia’s search form and was able to locate the majority of topics as asked. I noticed several things right off the bat. There is no real detailed description of Belkin’s Anomalous State of Knowledge (ASK) model, but this model is briefly mentioned in the Information Behaviour (yes, that’s how it’s spelled in Wikipedia) article which then references the biography article for Nicholas J. Belkin where ASK is mentioned in passing. The same goes for Dervin’s Sense Making model, which only mentioned her name but didn’t link to her biography until I fixed that. I wonder how long that link will stay because Brenda Dervin’s biography is flagged “The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia’s notability guideline for biographies.” AND, “If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted.” So far I’m feeling a little disappointed in the fact that Wikipedia contributors do not take an in depth interest in Information Science, seeing as they are producing information. Curious.

Sometimes the lack of tags can be confusing.

Another head scratcher was the biographies of Marcia J. Bates and David Weinberger. Both articles are tagged with a VIAF number, which on further investigation is defined as (by Wikipedia no less) “Virtual International Authority File…is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center”, yet, Bates’ biography is flagged “This biographical article relies on references to primary sources. Please add references to secondary or tertiary sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful.” and Weinberger’s is not flagged. This further confuses me since Bates’ biography is based on 19 sources and Weinberger’s is based on nine.

So I’m not really seeing any consistency or basically any rhyme or reason to what the heck Wikipedia is doing…maybe I’m just dense. Is there some behind the scenes tagging or categorizing that I’m not aware of that would prompt the addition of flags or absence thereof? Or is it simply that Weinberger is a figure that is recognized in a more public arena than Bates that makes his article “authoritative”? Does Wikipedia even know why? I looked through the discussion page and quickly decided that it takes a VERY special person to be a serious contributor to this forum…don’t think I’ll be clicking on the “Talk” tab any time real soon.

Something else that struck me; Wikipedia does not use any visible “tagging”, there are links to cross referencing articles, links to supporting materials, even links to cities mentioned in articles; links upon links upon links, but no identifiable tags. In his book, Everything is miscellaneous, Weinberger discusses the importance of making connections [p. 212], how connections can lead to discovery of alternate forms of information. For instance if I were posting a digital resume where I could utilize tags I would probably include words like “energetic”, “innovative”, “leadership”, “decisive”, “analytical”, etc.; to draw potential employers to me by inciting their curiosity about these qualities I’ve chosen to highlight in the hopes that they will be interested enough to seek further information about the skills or experience that these words describe. Fundamentally, they would be making connections between what qualities they want in an employee and what details on my resume they might discover that match and complement those qualities, which in turn gives them more knowledge about the level of performance they could expect from me. So tagging, I think, is a rather important aspect of knowledge; this form of metadata that leads from discovery to discovery, giving meaning to the messiness of miscellany.

We could apply Shedroff’s Model of Understanding (which has no entry in Wikipedia, nor is there an entry for Nathan Shedroff), which illustrates how creators and consumers of information interact with each other along the journey to the ultimate goal of wisdom. Those that tag items are creating data that describes information and makes it understandable to the consumer, which in turn allows the consumer to apply this knowledge in their life as an experience, which eventually leads to wisdom. So if a potential employer is seeking an employee that is energetic and innovative, they would be led to my resume which would give a more in depth picture of what those terms actually mean, following the bread crumbs through the forest. Weinberger writes that “Understanding is metaknowledge”, knowledge about knowledge, when the pieces fall into place and all the dots are connected we are able to see the big picture.