Second, That is an interesting problem: without the publishers, who will function as the givers of credibility, the gatekeepers? Who will wikipedia cite?
This is an excellent question. But already some publishers are more respected than others. O'Reilly is generally well known in the publishing world and everything I have read from any of their author's has been of reasonably high quality. While others are hacks that will publish anything almost anything at all with almost no editing (and if the author is willing to pay, many will publish absolutely anything at all with absolutely no editing.)
Maybe some evolution of publishers will continue primarily as fact-checkers and editors of the information, and then make money through a combination of advertising or convenience aggregating.
Yes, that's very true, and probably the single largest reason why I went with no-starch press rather than just distributing a pdf or the mediawiki. (well, that and it was no-starch who approached me, not the other way around.) Heck having copies printed probably wouldn't be that expensive, if I printed up a few hundred at a time. (I have access to cheap labor, a machine shop, and ebay. Tell me I couldn't bind a book myself.) They are a tier down from O'Reilly, but worlds above self-publishing, in terms of credibility.
I wonder if you could use the same incentive that we use to pay authors (which is to say, personal credibility and authority) to pay gatekeepers? I mean, there's nothing inherently expensive about doing it, you just need a person with good sense, good ethics, and a reasonable knowledge of the subject matter at hand.
I wonder if you could use the same incentive that we use to pay authors (which is to say, personal credibility and authority) to pay gatekeepers? I mean, there's nothing inherently expensive about doing it, you just need a person with good sense, good ethics, and a reasonable knowledge of the subject matter at hand.
I somewhat doubt it. There are two problems:
1. Even with authors, you can only get certain types to do that. Many technology books are written by professionals with a day job and they often are more worried about some combination of contributing to the community, improving their resume, getting personal recognition, etc than they are about money. This is not true about professional authors.
2. To be effective, gatekeepers need to already have credibility and authority, so that is probably not the best of motivators for them. Also, someone needs to do the grunt work of fact checking and grammatical editing. Many people consider writing to be fun, but few consider fact checking fun and fewer still consider grammatical editing fun.
Hm. See, well, at least in the technical publishing arena, this is the case 'cause we already get paid a lot more than all but the most famous authors. Your average writer of non-technical books is probably going to make very little money, and the bar to get a non-technical book published, I think, is higher than a technical book, in terms of writing skill. (a technical book, if technically correct, can
editors and fact-checkers, from what I understand, make less than half what a competent computer janitor makes.
Both these facts would point at people willing to do editing, fact checking and writing for less than what they could get doing other things. (assuming that the attributes needed to be a good editor or author are not a lot more common than the attributes required to be a SysAdmin.)
Now, there is a lot of difference between doing something you like for not very much money, and doing it for free, so you might be correct that people won't do it unless there is at least some money, but I see evidence that people will do it for less money than they could get doing other things.
as for the 'chicken and egg' part of the credibility issue, you are certainly correct if the same gateway/content producer relationship as we have now continues, but there are other models, like the model hacker news and other aggrigators use. If creators 'publish' content themselves to the 'net, then the 'gateways' just link to the content they find credible.
Now, the question is "how does the aggrigator decide what links are worthy?" there are many ways to do this, but I suspect the best may end up being subject matter experts running small aggrigators that cover their own interests.
Second, That is an interesting problem: without the publishers, who will function as the givers of credibility, the gatekeepers? Who will wikipedia cite?
This is an excellent question. But already some publishers are more respected than others. O'Reilly is generally well known in the publishing world and everything I have read from any of their author's has been of reasonably high quality. While others are hacks that will publish anything almost anything at all with almost no editing (and if the author is willing to pay, many will publish absolutely anything at all with absolutely no editing.)
Maybe some evolution of publishers will continue primarily as fact-checkers and editors of the information, and then make money through a combination of advertising or convenience aggregating.