Jessamyn on Collaborative Information Systems
Jessamyn writes about collaborators contributing information to the same effort. At first, I thought she was going to tie Wikinews into her post. I’ve been mulling the idea of collaborative news for a little more than a week and I still haven’t written anything substantial about it.
I read an article recently that might have benefitted from collaboration. A man claims he’s been watching a pair of birds in an area I frequent. I happen to have an interest in birds. (I have been refraining from writing about that in this space because it’s off-topic.) I am familiar with the kind of bird he claims to have seen. Though I have seen similar birds in the area, I have not seen the kind he claims to have watched for months. It would be easy to mistake one type of bird commonly in the area with the species he claims visits often. If an observer only sees them perched on top of buildings or perhaps even in flight, they might be mistaken for each other.
I’m not saying he hasn’t seen the birds nor am I saying he’s mistaken. If he’s correct and these birds are around, I’m baffled as to why I and a number of other people I know haven’t noticed them. In a situation like this where it’s one person’s observation alone making a claim, a claim that’s contested by others, collaboration becomes important. Maybe someone could have corrected his identification of the birds before he published the article. Maybe he could have interviewed other people who also saw these incredible birds. Maybe he could have been more specific about where and when he saw them so that bird watchers like myself might have an opportunity of a glimpse.
If I knew the article was written by multiple people, several people who had also seen these birds, I would be less likely to doubt that he actually saw them instead of questioning whether he saw the other birds and that perhaps he might have just misidentified them.
Collaboration has its benefits. Sometimes, multiple people working on a project means there are fewer mistakes. Sometimes, projects with multiple people can carry more authority because people might assume if several people have reviewed it, there are fewer errors. No remedies may exist for when people all believe the same erroneous information, though.
November 3rd, 2004 at 8:11 am
the post was starting out to be about wikinews but sadly [perhaps because of the election] I repeatedly couldn’t get the site to load over a 30 minute period so I set the wikinews links aside and talked about some other stuff. I think this collaborative info systems idea is worthwhile and your example is a good graspable example of why they’re useful.