Much of the culture of the Net has been built upon a kind of idealism, especially in relation to people offering their time to contribute content at no charge….

I should note that I came across this article today by getting recommended to it by one of the people I “follow” and trust on Twitter: Jason Calacanis. Another example of a type of “social graph search”,and something I will be discussing in some depth in the May issue of The Information Advisor.

On another note regarding whether idealism will and can work on the Net, I am attending a lecture later today by a professor in Media Studies in SUNY Buffalo, Trebor Scholz, who is giving a talk at the New School here in New York City that looks like it will be on a topic I’ve been wondering about recently: the labor implications when Internet users that contribute their time and efforts, at no cost, help firms “co-create” their products on the Net. The title of his talk is

“What the MySpace generation should know about working for free”

You are able to download an audio archive of the event on the site, which is supposed to made available 48 hours after the event, so perhaps by this weekend it will be available.

It was a thoughtful discussion, focusing on the appropriate role of academia in its relation to Wikipedia. There is a case to be made, in my view, of permitting–even encouraging the use of Wikipedia for academic use, but being more careful in allowing it to be cited as the source, if a citation is supposed to indicate reviewed authority.

During our discussion, Bryan Alexander went a step further in embracing Wikipedia and made the interesting proposal that professors have almost an ethical obligation to engage in Wikipedia and improving entries they are knowledgeable about to help make it better; however Professor Wyatt wondered if professors would take the time to engage in activities that did not help advance their careers.

I learned of a brand new version of Wikipedia just launched this week called Citizendium,
a just launched effort that attempts to introduce more accountability into a user created online encyclopedia by prohibiting anonymity and providing what it terms “gentle expert oversight”. So far it is a very small effort with just 1,100 articles.

But it looks a whole lot promising than the also recently launched Conservapedia, which is supposed to be an alternative to what Conservapedia’s founders felt was a liberal bias to Wikipedia. It’s not even necessary though to get into the extremely questionable merits of a politically conservative online encyclopedia like this (a “fair and balanced” version of information for the Web?); it’s enough to look at some of the atrocious quality of so many of Conservapedia’s entries on its own merits to see that this site is not worth one’s time.