{"id":80,"date":"2005-02-16T17:25:39","date_gmt":"2005-02-16T17:25:39","guid":{"rendered":"\/ifbookblog\/?p=80"},"modified":"2005-02-16T17:25:39","modified_gmt":"2005-02-16T17:25:39","slug":"building_the_cathedral_collabo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/2005\/02\/16\/building_the_cathedral_collabo\/","title":{"rendered":"building the cathedral: collaborative authorship and the internet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The World Wide Web is, quite possibly, the most collaborative multi-cultural project in the history of mankind. Millions of people have contributed personal homepages, blogs, and other sites to the growing body of human expression available online. It is, one could say, the secular equivalent of the medieval cathedral, designed by a professional, but constructed by non-professionals, regular folk who are eager to participate in the construction of a legacy. Such is the context for projects like <a href=http:\/\/www.wikimedia.org>Wikimedia<\/a> and <a href=http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Semantic_Web\">the Semantic Web<\/a>, designed by elite programmers, built by the masses.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"df083hereford-s.jpg\" img style=\"margin:4px;\" src=\"\/blog\/archives\/df083hereford-s.jpg\" width=\"371\" height=\"200\" align=\"left\"\/> One of the most pressing questions with regard to collaborative authorship is, <i>can the content be trusted<\/i>? Does the anonymous group author have the same authority as the credentialed single author?  Is our belief in the quality of information inextricably connected to our belief in the authority of the writer? Wikimedia (the non-profit organization that initiated Wikipedia, Wikibooks,, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikisource, and Wikiquote) addresses these concerns by offering a new model for collaborative authorship and peer review. Wikipedia&#8217;s anonymously published articles undergo peer review via direct peer revision. All revisions are saved and linked; user actions are logged and reversible. &#8220;This type of constant editing,&#8221; Wikimedia co-director <a href=\"http:\/\/www.decadeofwebdesign.org\/speakers.html#beesley\">Angela Beesley<\/a> alleges, &#8220;allows you to trust the content over time.&#8221; The ambition of Wikimedia is to create a neutral territory where, through open debate, consensus can be reached on even the most contentious topics. The Wikimedia authoring system sets up a democratic forum where contributors construct their own rulespace and policies emerge from consensus-based, rather than top-down, processes. So the authority of the Wikimedia collaborative book depends, in part, on a collective self-discipline that is defined by and enforced by the group.<br \/>\nThe collaborative authoring environment engendered by the web will make even more ambitious and far-reaching projects possible. Projects like the Semantic Web, which aims to make all content searchable by allowing users to assign semantic meaning to their work, will organize the prodigious output of collaborative networks, and could, potentially, cast the entire web as a collaboratively authored &#8220;book.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The World Wide Web is, quite possibly, the most collaborative multi-cultural project in the history of mankind. Millions of people have contributed personal homepages, blogs, and other sites to the growing body of human expression available online. It is, one could say, the secular equivalent of the medieval cathedral, designed by a professional, but constructed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[374,1861],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences_and_excursions","category-the_networked_book"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}