Background

We may take it as an incontrovertible truth that the Internet has radically transformed the way individuals and groups of individuals create, distribute, and use information resources. In fact, after less than 15 years of widespread use of Internet resources, the aforementioned statement seems quaint and understated -- like saying that the invention of the automobile changed a few things. This simple fact-of-life aside, it is perhaps more useful for us as information professionals to engage the heavy-lifting work of evaluating how effective commonly used Internet resources are at helping users acquire knowledge and suggesting ways in which these resources might be improved from an epistemological perspective.

Much has been said and discussed in this course (IRLS 617 Social Epistemology) about the ubiquitous Wikipedia and its paradigm-shifting impact on how we look at the the creation and use of information -- particularly in a digital world. Wikipedia, as a mass collaboration encyclopedia, has revolutionized the way individuals seek and use information, and, as we might expect, has also raised some serious epistemological concerns about the information it presents. A recent article from the journal Nature published findings of an in-house study that determined that Wikipedia is relatively accurate in comparison to the print gold-standard of Encyclopedia Brittanica. Encyclopedia Brittanica publicly called into question their methods and refuted the journal's claims. Wikipedia gains its strength from the same logic that has advanced the open source software movement to become a formidable opponent to the two yet-unchallenged corporate leaders -- that a critical mass of users trumps (or at least rivals)
the accuracy and efficiency of similar resources created by more monolithic entities.

Had it reached the level of its current popularity at the time Paul Duguid wrote "Limits of Self-Organization...," Digg might have been a useful target for the application of his "laws of quality." While not necessarily a traditional collection of resources, Digg's mash-up of social networking and digital information sharing and aggregation presents a ripe subject for the study of memetics. With millions of users taking part in the Digg experiment, it puts Duguid's first law to the test -- namely that the number of people involved gives an indication of the potential quality of the resource.

And it is with that "wisdom of the crowds" logic in mind that we stumbled upon Digg.com as a complex information resource driven by mass collaboration. Digg is modestly self-defined as a "a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web." A less understated description might mention that Digg represents a conglomeration of social networking, information discovery, and global journalism in one site that maintains a stable position in the top 25 visited sites in the United States and the top 100 visited sites in the world. We will have more to say regarding how exactly Digg works to popularize and share information (see "How Digg Works"), but for now it is enough to know that Digg empowers members of its community (over 1 million strong) to "digg" items they find on the Internet and popularize them through a critical mass of "diggs."

In a sense, Digg may be seen as the world's largest mass collaboration online newspaper, but we would like to extend the role of community members from simply being editors to being ad-hoc information scientists as well. Each member of Digg is engaged in selecting, evaluating, and cataloging online information resources to aid the discovery of those resources for future users. As a project engaging "scientists" in collaborative knowledge building and sharing, therefore, we think it appropriate to adopt Paul Thagard's nuanced version of epistemological assessment (1997). Thagard, unsatisfied with Alvin Goldman's focus on the verity of information resources in his epistemological appraisal standards, stated that scientists would
be reticent to identify their findings as "truths," since most of science is a continuous cycle of observation, discovery, and challenge. Rather than focusing on the "truth" of findings, Thagard proposes an epistemological appraisal of results. According to Thagard (1997), results "can include both empirical results consisting of experimental or observational findings, as well as theoretical results that consist of the development of theories that explain the empirical results. The criteria for counting something as a result are less stringent and metaphysical than those for counting something as a truth; as a first approximation, we can count an empirical or theoretical claim as a result if it is acceptable by a scientist's peers."

With this caveat in mind, we aim to apply a qualified appraisal of Goldman's epistemological standards to Digg with a focus on the results of the work Digg and its community members are doing. Again, Thagard's reframing of Goldman's appraisal is illustrative:

1. The reliability of a practice is measured by the ratio of results to total number of results and errors fostered by the practice;
2. The power of a practice is measured by its ability to help cognizers find the answers to the questions that interest them;
3. The fecundity of a practice is its ability to lead to large numbers of results for many practitioners;
4. The speed of a practice is how quickly it leads to results;

Before beginning our appraisal of Digg, however, it is useful to spend some time becoming familiar with Digg -- how and why it works, and — at times — does not work so well.