Determining Trust on the Internet

After reading Axel Brun’s chapters five and six on Wikipedia and considering it in relation to the internet's Tim Berners-Lee's article on "Web Science" originally found in 2008 Scientific American, I am interested the web-tech community's call for “engineering layers of trust and provenance into Web interaction” at the same time they argue for open access. The tension between the collaborative system of knowledge represented in Wikipedia and the call for verifiable information along the likes of an electronic library in the public domain that is sustainable, searchable, stable, and linked is a challenging problem.

Potential Areas of Research
The three areas of research that might be interesting are 1) What systems will be used to authenticate verifiable information? 2) What are the ramifications in terms of free speech and free access? 3) When is verifiable information required and what is the effect on sustainable communities?

"Toward a New Alexandria"

In her New Republic article, Lisbet Rausing asks today’s educated and engaged public to imagine such an electronic library that opens up scholarship to the public in an open web environment.  She argues for open access to entire fields of scholarship to the general public in the manner that the scientific community has embraced open access and scholarly collaboration.  It is an interesting read, and here is an excerpt:

We guardians need to do this for the public's sake and for our own. Right now, projects to open up scholarship mostly pertain to the natural sciences, and mostly concern present academic work. Twentieth-century scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences is lacking. Authored by academics hoping not for monetary gains, but for renown among their peers and influence over the public, and financed by means of taxes and charitable gifts, this incomparable treasure trove is locked away from society by “The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998” (also known as the “Micky Mouse Protection Act”). It is an ironic fate—a second death, if you will—for the great refugee scholars of Europe. Think only of Erwin Panovsky, Gershom Scholem, Kurt Gödel, Marc Bloch, Ludwik Fleck, or Simone Weil.

Look at JSTOR (if you can). There you find the evidence-based, source-critical foundations of sociology, anthropology, geography, history, philosophy, classics, Oriental studies, theology, musicology, history of science and so on. They are all closed to the public. It is wonderful, of course, that high-energy physics and string theory are open to all. But is it not ironic that we have opened the gates only to that scholarship which few professors, let alone members of the public, have the cognitive capacity and appropriate training to grasp?

The opportunity costs for society are self-evident. But what about the opportunity cost for scholars? For example, the public has set itself the task to rewrite knowledge for the public domain through Wikipedia and the like. Should not these sites be hyperlinked with JSTOR? By excluding the public from their scholarly literature, academics make it impossible for amateurs to use sound research methodologies, critically examining evidence by cross-referencing and source analysis. Scholars then critique the public’s output for not being sufficiently academic. Academics commonly refer to the occasionally wobbly scholarly standards of Wikipedia as proof the public does not wish to pursue scholarship. Might it not instead prove that they do not let them?