[drn-discuss] Orlowski attacks again

Mon Apr 17 09:31:57 BST 2006

What a load of... Orlowski.

I wrote the following letter to the technology editor (tech at guardian.co.uk):

http://dooooooom.blogspot.com/2006/04/glut-of-knowledge.html

Andrew Orlowski's article "A thirst for knowledge" (13 April) seems to 
boil down to the following:

1. The president and previous editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia 
Britannica dislike claims made in Nature that it is of similar quality 
to its free rival, Wikipedia. Rather than backing up these concerns in a 
peer-reviewed article published by one of the world's leading scientific 
journals, they pick figures such as "31% less reliable" out of the air. 
They then add largely irrelevant concerns such as writing quality and 
over-the-top claims of "gross offences against publishing."

2. Contradicting his previous claims on quality, the president of 
Encyclopaedia Britannica then criticises the Internet for a homogeneity 
of discourse. That seems a breathtakingly ignorant claim; and one that 
in no way, of course, applies to his own encyclopaedia.

3. The American Library Association's president makes the claim that "No 
one would tell you a student using Google today is producing work as 
good as they were 20 years ago using printed sources." Ah, that golden 
age where all students' information needs were funded through the 
university library budget.

4. Will Davies notes that the Internet "hasn't made us addicted to 
education." How odd to imagine that it was intended to do so.

5. Orlowski concludes by claiming that a better model is to fund 
libraries to pay large fees to provide their users with access to 
commercial databases. Why should this be the case for many of the 
databases which contain information that is gradually moving to free 
access online, such as law reports, mapping data and academic publications?

It is also odd that an article premised on the essential poor quality of 
Wikipedia fails to mention the move towards adding expert review in 
systems such as Digital Universe. Maybe this was to do with the 
article's own homogeneity of discourse. Why didn't it quote positive 
views from anyone at Wikipedia, or indeed anywhere else?

Overall, an extremely unenlightening piece.