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Scott Leslie wonders why "First Monday publishes this article by the co-author of The Social Life of Information, Paul Duguid, that asks questions about the oft-asserted transferability of "laws of quality" from open source software projects to the peer production of 'knowledge' in sites like Wikipedia, and literally almost no one replies." Perhaps, he says, "everyone just read this already and went on with their business." Count me as one who read it and went about his business. Well - I thought I had linked to it, but I didn't.

Why? I found his example ridiculous. So Project Gutenberg is forced to use an older, less reliable source because of copyright restrictions. This is a criticism of open source? So little used and obscure open data is wrong. This somehow refutes the 'many eyeballs' theory? And his methodology is akin to finding some bugs in some minor open source software and comncluding that therefore commercial software is of better quality.

I guess I figured someone else would say these things (some days I get tired of being the messenger). Guess not, eh? (p.s. speaking of being the messenger - Scott, why is your site now launching really annoying popup ads?) (p.p.s check out Scott Leslie's talk, The Future CMS.) Scott leslie, EdTechPost, November 6, 2006. [Link] [Tags: , , , , , , , ] [Previous][Next]

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Re: Article -

Les Nessman, November 6, 2006

sorry about the pop-ups. This just started. The usage tracking image I had apparently has now implemented a policy of really annoying popups. It has been removed. Totally unintended. Sorry. I guess I don't read Duguid's article the same way ou do. I say it as just prompting the wikipedia folks (specifically, I agree the Gutenburg examples kind of lame) as well as Benkler to examine some of the statements concerning 'laws of quality' and examine whether these are in fact true, not arguing that commercial software was better. I didn't see the latter anywhere in there. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Duguid: 'Limits of self-organisation: peer-production and the

Anymouse, November 7, 2006

I have to agree with Scott Leslie on this one. I think the "conventional" assumption that there is no problem to contend with concerning the quality of open content is worth discussing, and that Duguid's article tackles this in an interesting way, notwithstanding the poor Project Gutenberg example. For me the way open source gets elided with open content - as in Linux is of excellent quality therefore open content will be - is an issue which needs plenty of discussion, and which people slide away from. That's why I like Steven Weber's "Success of Open Source": he tries to delineate the circumstances in which open source methods might be expected to work properly [1]. And much as I'd like it to be otherwise, I am not confident that the production of learning materials, say, (easily) fits these circumstances. [1] http://www.schmoller.net/mailings/tsoos.html [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

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