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
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?
Carbon at LANL: http://periodic.lanl.gov/elements/6.html
Carbon at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon
Diana Bittern
Director of Product Management
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