¿Es la wikipedia un saber subalterno o un saber para/de todxs?

Sigo el blog de  Platter que da claves muy interesantes para quienes nos dedicamos a investigar en las humanidades . En su blog acaba de plantear la cuestión de si la wiki es o no conocimiento fiable. A mi también me parece interesante pensar si la wiki es un almacén global de saberes subalternos o un saber común. Platter comentar comenta :

The eminent Prof William Cronon, President of the American Historians Association also also advocates its use.

Wikipedia is today the gateway through which millions of people now seek access to knowledge which not long ago was only available using tools constructed and maintained by professional scholars. Whatever the reference tools we consulted—dictionaries, almanacs, encyclopedias, books of quotations, finding aids, bibliographies—we did so because their contents had been carefully scrutinized by professionals with appropriate scholarly training.

No longer. Wikipedia and its kin have changed all that, and those of us who inhabit the world of scholarship need to ponder the ongoing role of professional authority when traditional disciplines can no longer maintain the kind of intellectual monopolies that their members once took for granted. No one needs a PhD in a subject, or even a baccalaureate major, to contribute or modify Wikipedia entries. Although the wide-open Wiki world sometimes harbors howling errors, even outright fraud, the overall quality of Wikipedia content is remarkably good. If one's goal is quick consultation for information one can check in other ways, or a brief orientation to an unfamiliar topic, then it's hard to imagine a more serviceable tool than Wikipedia. I even have an app that downloads to my iPhone the entire English-language contents of the site—over four gigabytes—so I always have it at my fingertips even when I'm offline.

Patt Thompson plantea que hemos de estar alertas a lo que llaman "crap detection", detectar mierda en la información que circula. Para la wiki, como para cualquier blog o textoacadémico propone que nos hagamos las siguientes preguntas:

- origen del material
- las credenciales de quien escribe y sus fuentes
- las posibilidades de confirmar lo que dice
- el punto de vista o agenda desde la que se ha suministrado la información

a toda información subalterna/experta o del tipo que sea  merece la pena hacerle esas preguntas para hacer una lectura crítica de lo que leemos.

Si queréis seguir a Pat Thompson ahí va su blog
http://patthomson.wordpress.com/