It took me two years to notch up my first two hundred posts on this blog. It’s taken only six months to reach this three hundredth entry. I wondered whether the increased posting frequency was due to several months without work, but looking back it seems I actually blog at least as frequently during the busy times. I suspect the pressure to focus disparate thoughts and observations in a tighter timeframe results in less procrastination and more writing.
With the flurry of January Series posts one thing that slipped through the cracks was a planned post on wikipedia. Some very public criticism of the wikipedia project from one of its founders was followed by a storm of entries on the subject. The core of the discussion was whether the anyone-can-contribute, peer-reviewed model embraced by wikipedia resulted in a ’trustworthy’ information source.
There’s been plenty of discussion over recent years, but we’re going to hear a lot more about the question of ’trustworthiness’ of sources as time progresses and web-based resources become more and more the norm. I link to wikipedia as they often provide the best introduction to concepts, not because I consider it in any way authoritative. There’s a series of booklets published in Cambridge that describe themselves as “not the last word… but often the first.” That’s probably what wikipedia does best.