Social Media's Coming of Age as Authoritative?

Following a revamping of Knovel’s platform earlier this year, we received a number of complaints from our customers saying, in effect, “Shame On You,” for making a change that linked our site’s Periodic Table of Elements to, of all places, Wikipedia.  Responding as a responsible Product Manager, I instructed our IT team to restore the links to the officially sanctioned, authoritative site, the Los Alamos National Lab (lanl.gov). 

Yesterday, at the Gilbane Conference, I listened to the keynote speaker, Michael Edson, Chief of Information Technology, at the Smithsonian Institution, evangelize for a “Smithsonian Commons,” where valuable resources can be released and made available for the use and benefit of everyone. He cited the example of a search on Google for SpaceShipOne, the first privately developed, successfully piloted space craft.  The Smithsonian has the actual ship in its Air and Space Museum, and there’s a blurb about it on their website; but if you Google SpaceShipOne, the Smithsonian’s ‘authoritative source’ isn’t even in the Top 10 results!  Guess which site is right up there near the top?  Wikipedia, with hyperlinks, video clips, the works! 

It got me thinking about my reaction to restore LANL as Knovel’s source for ‘authoritative’ information on the Periodic Table. Was I too hasty?  Consider the fact that Wikipedia has become just about the most accessed Internet destination for encyclopedic information, and its self-policing, self-regulating policies are well documented and followed by its myriad editors.  Verifiability is one of Wikipedia’s core content policies, and editors are encouraged to challenge any material deemed unreliable.   If these policies didn’t work, Wikipedia would have  disappeared long ago into the noise bin of the Internet, and would never have risen above long-standing, traditional resources like Britannica* and World Book. And have you ever noticed that the WIkipedia community's response to errors is virtually instantaneous, while on institutionalized sites, update cycles may be in days, weeks or even months?  Is it time to stop resisting the value of social media and start contributing to its success?

I caught up with Michael at a break, and asked him what he would have done in my situation.  He was intrigued, and replied, “Hmmm, I’d put them both up, and see which one my customers liked the best.”     Maybe we will. Meanwhile, what do you think?

Carbon at LANL: http://periodic.lanl.gov/elements/6.html

Carbon at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon

 * a link to the Britannica site does appear in the External Links section of Wikipedia’s entry.

Diana Bittern
Director of Product Management