Social knowledge production and services

In taking up this week’s assignment, I found the Duguid piece particularly inspiring. His research method seemed to resonate with our task at hand. His comparison and contrast (via cross-referencing) between “traditional” knowledge production (what he calls “most reliable sources” [15] or “traditional and professional equivalents,” to borrow Dr. Gazan’s words) and social knowledge production generated by various applications of Web 2.0 sheds valuable light on how the two forms of knowledge could inform one another in complementary ways. Hoping to make a similar case as Duguid’s, especially in his section on Wikipedia, I immediately picked the first of the four general areas of comparison: Peer production in online environments vs. in-person collaboration. And I attempted to make some observations about how “traditional” and “social” forms of knowledge could complement one another. My example comes from one event in Indonesian history known as the “Madiun Affaire,” which took place on 18 September 1948 in Madiun, a provincial town on the island of Java. This is also a topic I have written a paper about several years ago by relying solely on books and articles in print.

So, what do we learn about the Madiun Affair by using Web 2.0? Not surprisingly, I first turned to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madiun_Affair):

The entry informs us that it was “a communist uprising in 1948.” Then, I went on to look into “Revision history of Madiun Affair.” There are seven different versions of the Madiun entry, including the current rendition. One thing that caught my eye was that the entry was originally created on 14 July 1948 “at the Indonesian Revolution” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_National_Revolution) and later (on the same day!) included into a broader category, “History of Indonesia” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indonesia).

The next step I took was to compare the Wikipedia entry to its equivalent in Encyclopedia Britannica, a peer-reviewed and reputable encyclopedia (i.e. Carol Tenpir’s “Quality Still Matters” succinctly compares errors in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica). But instead of turning to Encyclopedia Britannica via UHM Library (login required), I continued to use open-access resources online. The entry on “Madiun Affair” is about the same length as the Wikipedia counterpart, and the content, too, is not so different from the Wikipedia entry (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/355889/Madiun-Affair). For instance, the first sentence reads: “communist rebellion against the Hatta-Sukarno government of Indonesia, which originated in Madiun, a town in eastern Java, in September 1948.”

Having reviewed both entries, we learn that the Madiun Affair was a Communist uprising/rebellion against the Indonesian government in September 1948. This perspective is not so far-fetched from what you find in “traditional” resources in print. For instance, George Kahin, a leading political scientist and historian of Indonesia in 1950s-1990s, wrote a chapter on the Madiun Affair (256-303) in his Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952). Today many scholars in the field consider the book as a classic on Indonesian nationalism. And Kahin titled the aforementioned chapter, “The Internal Struggle for Power from Renville through the Communist Rebellion.”

At the same time, given its sheer volume, the chapter naturally offers more in-depth coverage of the turn of events, and we meet those individuals who were closely linked to the incidence. For instance, on the outbreak of the affair, Kahin writes:
“After consolidating its control over the villages, the Pesindo [Socialist Youth of Indonesia] and other PKI [Indonesian Communist Party] troops seized control of the towns and the city of Madiun. . . . This militant phase began at 3 A.M. on September 18 in Madiun with Sumarsono and Djokosujono leading the operation. . . .” (291).

Then, can we learn more about Sumarsono and Djokosujono through social computing? I turned to Google as most Internet users would do in this type of situation and conducted a plain keyword search, “sumarsono madiun.” Interestingly (and to my excitement), the search led me to a serendipitous encounter with two columns by Ibrahim Isa (
http://www.polarhome.com/pipermail/nasional-a/2002-October/000051.html; http://www.polarhome.com/pipermail/nasional-a/2002-October/000052.html). In the posts, Isa talks about a meeting held in the Netherlands in 2002, where dozens of participants, mainly Indonesians based in Europe, sat down with Sumarsono and shared his eyewitness accounts of the Madiun Affair. In my earlier reading of published sources, I have tracked a couple of his personal accounts about his involvement in the Madiun Affair (i.e. Hersri Setiawan, 2002). But this was the first time I have heard of the meeting, and his view expressed at the meeting seems to be in line with what he has said about Madiun in the published equivalents.

To turn to a technological side of the story, Isa’s posts are archived in a list serve called National-a Archives maintained by four moderators (http://www.polarhome.com/mailman/listinfo/nasional-a). The National-a Archive is a closed and a hidden list, which means that the list administrators screen our online “applications” and decide our status (approved/rejected). The list of members is available only to the administrators. The National-a Archives list is also included in www.polarhome.com Mailing Lists (http://www.polarhome.com/mailman/listinfo). I was able to review Isa’s posts because they were archived as “prior postings,” which were released at some unknown point for public viewing. I hope that with my somewhat haphazard attempt above, I was able to give some specifics to how traditional and social forms of knowledge could possibly inform one another.

At the same time, we are also reminded about limitations of social knowledge production and services, as Leibenluft writes about Yahoo! Answers:
“While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren’t true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information.” (1)

On the other hand, Geisler and Burns are more optimistic about the usefulness of the growing web-based social tagging systems, particularly for digital video and moving image. In analyzing the mechanism of web-based social tagging systems, Lerman refers to Digg, one of the most successful social news aggregators, and suggests that the site’s success owes much to its reliable information filtering moderated by networks of “friends.” When it comes to issues of trust, the Haythornthwaite piece gives the topic a new twist by introducing three key dimensions of trust management; recognition, reputation, and reward. Finally, as Geisler, Burns, and Lerman do in their studies on social tagging systems, Gazan and Dempsey explore aspects of current innovations in social knowledge production, social annotations in digital library collections and the integration of mobile communication into library services, respectively.