Authority (October 11, 2005)
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000057.php

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I have a problem with authority. It's not that I'm independent,
insubordinate, and contrarian. I am, but that's not my problem. My
problem is with the rising abuse of the word amongst bloggers,
wikipedians, folksonomists, and other social software activists.

In the good old days, not so long ago, in the context of the written
word, authority was a term used primarily by librarians as a criteria
of evaluation. Along with accuracy, objectivity, and currency, we
judged source authority. Who is the author? Who is the publisher? What
are their individual and institutional qualifications and reputations?
Have the contents been edited and refereed? Is this an authoritative
source?

But then, authority was appropriated by the Technorati mob, where it
swiftly lost definition in a tangled tag soup of popularity, power,
trust, credibility, and relevance. These words were tossed around
indiscriminately in a Bacchanalian festival of semantic anarchy.

For those of us who value a taste of hierarchy along with our
hypertext, things were beginning to look a bit dicey. Fortunately,
before the tag clouds could totally eclipse the sun, a new entity
emerged as a source of authority and illumination.

The Wikipedia

Just as we feared that nobody was in control, the world's largest,
most accessible, and most widely used encyclopedia appeared to
reassure us that, to the contrary, everybody is in control.

From evolution to intelligent design, the accuracy, objectivity, and
currency is surprisingly good. And, in fact, the entry on authority is
really quite helpful:

"People obey authority out of respect, while they obey power out of
fear…Authority need not be consistent or rational, it only needs to be
accepted as a source of permission or truth."

The article describes Maximilian Weber's three types of authority
(traditional, rational-legal, charismatic) and offers links to related
concepts like law, power, and trust. Or, at least it did at the
precise moment in time when I visited. The words may since have changed.

But this fluidity, while problematic for citations, does not by
necessity harm its cognitive authority. Now, some old-fashioned
librarians may claim that due to the pseudo-anonymous, multi-author
nature of the Wikipedia, its articles have no authority. But they'd be
wrong. Authority derives from the information architecture, visual
design, governance, and brand of the Wikipedia, and from widespread
faith in intellectual honesty and the power of collective intelligence.

Of course, sometimes trolls intentionally post lies, and sometimes
amateurs mistakenly post untruths, but before we cast stones at the
Wikipedia, it's worth revisiting our faith in the authority of
traditional printed sources, for even the revered Encyclopaedia
Britannica is riddled with errors, not to mention the subtle yet
pervasive biases of individual subjectivity and corporate correctness.

And anyone who reads newspapers, books, or academic journals knows
things are only getting worse. As the industry endures a perfect storm
of rising competition and falling readership, traditional publishing
has entered an era of error. Proper spelling and punctuation are but
trivial casualties in a war of attrition that long since killed off
the fact checkers.

The Hyperbole of Folksonomy

In this disruptive milieu, the emergence of the Wikipedia as a poster
child for bottom-up publishing and collaborative categorization (along
with the relatively minor successes of de.licio.us and Flickr), has
inspired a motley crew of rapture-ready anarchists, anti-taxonomists,
and folksonomy fetishists to predict not just the demise of
traditional publishing but the end of hierarchy itself.

Though folksonomy was born on an information architecture list, it was
quickly hijacked by the Technorati. Says Dave Sifry:

"Tags are a simple, yet powerful, social software innovation. Today
millions of people are freely and openly assigning metadata to content
and conversations. Unlike rigid taxonomy schemes that people dislike,
the ease of tagging for personal organization with social incentives
leads to a rich and discoverable folksonomy. Intelligence is provided
by real people from the bottom-up to aid social discovery. And with
the right tag search and navigation, folksonomy outperforms more
structured approaches to classification."

Now don't get me wrong. I like tags as much as the next geek. And I
enjoy the revolutionary rhetoric of the free-tagging movement, to a
point. But when Tim O'Reilly, the publisher behind the lemur and polar
bear books, starts predicting the death of taxonomy, it's time to set
the record straight.

You see, tags are only the visible, superficial symbols of a much
deeper, more interesting revolution in findability and authority.
Wikipedia doesn't beat Britannica because it has better folksonomies.
It wins because it's more findable. And its success didn't come
without structure. In fact, the Wikipedia has a traditional
information architecture (with strong design conventions and a fixed
left-hand navigation bar) and a traditional governance model (with
Jimbo Wales and his Board of Trustees as the ultimate corporate
authority).

Of course, the Wikipedia is only a foot solider in this revolution led
by Google. After all, Larry and Sergey were the first to capitalize on
folksonomies in the 1990s with the advent of the PageRank algorithm
which uses links as indicators of authority and aboutness. In this
sense, Google is by far the biggest story in free tagging. And along
the way, Google has taught us a couple of lessons:

1. It's the Findability, Stupid!

2. The Revolution is Multi-Algorithmic.

Google is worth nearly $90 billion because Google helps us find what
we seek. And Google has delivered superior findability via a
multi-algorithmic approach that recognizes the value of:

* Full Text. Matching keywords in the query and content.

* Information Architecture. Analyzing the internal link structure and
hand-crafted metadata of each web site.

* Free Tagging. Leveraging the links between web sites.

And while famous Googlebombs like miserable failure show us that
sometimes the authority of the masses can redefine the aboutness of
the object, usually there's a good match between the words of the
author and searcher. As leading indicatrs of semantic serendipity, the
folksonomies of Flickr and del.icio.us are cool, but when it comes to
findability or re-findability, stacked up against Google and Google
Images and Google Desktop, they barely merit attention.

Authority Unbound

Herbert Simon's conclusion that we satisfice under conditions of
bounded rationality was decidedly optimistic. Anyone who's studied
bias in decision making knows that "unbounded irrationality" is a more
fair and balanced description of human psychology and behavior.
Well-documented decision making traps include:

* Anchoring. When considering a decision, we are unduly influenced by
the first information we find.

* Confirmation. Through selective search and perception, we
subconsciously seek data that supports our existing point of view, and
avoid contradictory evidence.

This puts into context the amazing power of Google and the Wikipedia
and other highly findable sources of information to influence what we
learn, who we trust, and how we make decisions.

Of course, we must also recognize the power that devolves to the
individual in an open media landscape that enables us to select our
sources and choose our news. In today's Google economy, we are
increasingly becoming our own authority.

The real upheaval lies just ahead, as a generation of school kids (and
their teachers and librarians) struggle to reconcile traditional
notions of education and objectivity and authority with the
constructivist web of social facts and collective intelligence where
folksonomies flourish and the truth is a virus of many colors. I can
hardly wait.

Viva La Revolution!