Florian Cramer on Thu, 27 Dec 2007 04:39:20 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> "Google distorts reality" |
On Wednesday, December 26 2007, 15:43 (+0100), geert lovink wrote: > Google distorts reality, Austrian study says > > Download the study (in English) here: > http://www.iicm.tugraz.at/iicm_papers/dangers_google.pdf The problem of this report is that potentially valid points of political and economic criticism are muddled under borderline crackpot rhetoric and 100-pages-rants against academic plagiarism and "the Google-Wikipedia version of reality." Yes, this really is what the authors mean and believe: "The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is problematic not only because of vandalism or fabrication of data. It is also problematic because of the often unknown origin of the basic texts than adapted by the authors' collective of net users. In some reported cases already the very first version of a Wikipedia entry was plagiarised, often copied nearly verbatim without the use of much "brain power" from an older print source. [...] These are only some examples or case studies of an evolving text culture without brains also on the Wikipedia." [...] "Nevertheless there are some major frictions which don't make the situation easier, especially for the younger Google Copy Paste generation used to the net. Just have a closer look at a paragraph of the "GNU Free Documentation License", an older license for example still prominently used by Wikipedia. By this license the copying of texts, images, and otherwise information is allowed under the condition that the copier publishes the copied version under the same license (alone this would be impossible in the classical academic publishing system!) and is mentioning the source." The study unfortunately is little more than academics outraged over universal plebeian information access and what they perceive as the apocalypse of good academic knowledge culture through suspicious programming and equally suspicious popular use of search engines. Since the authors completely fail to reflect, let alone criticize, academic databases like the Scientific Citation Index, Dissertation Abstracts, the MLA bibliography etc. by their own standards, it makes their polemic, politely said, a bit one-sided. By conflating Google and Wikipedia, the authors fail to differentiate between a private corporate entity built on trade-secret algorithms and search methods as its business model [Google] and a source community non-profit which is fully transparent on the level of its software engine, its contents and its organization [Wikipedia]. It even seems as if the authors falsely believe Wikipedia to be a company since they demand that "search engines should be run by non-profit organisations" (p. 74) - Wikipedia (and Wikisearch) should thus be what they are looking for. A real economic or political analysis or critique of Google is conversely missing in the study. But not only that, the Google bashing becomes a bit funny, if not questionable, if one looks at Mr. Maurer's home page http://www.iicm.tugraz.at/home/hm_hp/vitae and the following document linked to it: http://www.hyperwave.com/e/partners/technology -F [Still having to work on responses to the "Semantic Web" thread, I know.] -- http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70 gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org