Interesting point. Plus, many people have a habit of mistrusting officially sanctioned research. Consider how many copies of National Enquirer and Weekly World News get sold everyday. Word of mouth has always been the strongest source of advertising as well. I think that projects like Wikipedia may cause people to become better critics, especially if they're burned a few times by trusting spurious sources.

I must admit, I had never looked at Wikipedia, but now that I have, I love it, and all the articles I read were great.

maybe we should start the Wikipedia college. All courses, distance ed, using the Wikipedia as the main course text :)

Beside lack of access to pay services and mistrust of official sources, one could also make the open source argument, right? More people involved in the wikipedia community and project, the more likely the content is to be good - to have been reviewed by many eyes, etc.

I'm not sure about a university based on the wikipedia :) but I can certainly see it as part of a course: add/update a wikipedi article?

In my advanced technical writing class last term, I asked students to edit short overlapping lists of terms from the Interactive Fiction Glossary, a volunteer project that has about 180 or so terms after being started in July. Many students just made surface editing changes, since they knew they were expected to do something, but a few asked really good clarifying questions that were answered by other volunteers from cyberspace. On the negative side, a flood of surface changes right around the deadline for the class assignment annoyed some of the regular volunteers.

By the way, please feel free to add your $.02 to the glossary.

It would make sense to do this in graduate classes, too. Join in an open knowledge project and write for that project: review or expand existing texts or create new articles.

Sort of like what Landow did with the Victorian web, only I think that projects like the one you describe, or the Wikipedia, have the potential to be more useful than a huge constructive web without clear organizational principles or means to search. For example, when I took a look at it, Landow's Cyberspace, Hypertext and Critical Theory Web it was too difficult for me to find anything in it. They were all independent projects which were loosely associated, but without the coherence to make them as useful as they could be to researchers and learners.

BTW: I really like the groundbreaking work that Landow has done. But developing the larger resources now possible on the web takes different information management approaches.

Maybe I should talk about this in my "Introducing the Wiki" presentation at C&W.

yep :)

or at least tie it into landow's work discussing contructive webs. michael joyce talks about it to.