Revised Essay Response: Authority

Zhu Ye
LIBY1551
Revised Essay Response: Authority

Well, to me, it seems that if you want to be an expert in something, you must familiar with it. That’s the basic thing. Then after you get to know it, you have your own opinion of it. And you share it with your friends and learn from them. After a while, you may feel that it is not enough for you. And you start to learn from the internet or from the library. If you don’t have the chance to use these ways, you learn from strangers. And you correct yourself from the learning; your knowledge growth by time. And people who talked with you learn from you. You also learn from your experience. The longer you learning in one area or in one thing, the more you learn. And the more you learn, the more you get closer to be an expert. And talking about authority, in our mind, the authority always occurs to the field of professor or those people who are filled with knowledge. We all know that the knowledge and authority are all from people, from many experiments. But we also have social knowledge, they are from society, which means each person may have own opinion, and these opinions may be the authority in the future.
In the article “The Book Stops Here”, Daniel H. Pink discusses the way that the encyclopedias’ creation has changed by time. He tells us about the story of Wikipedia, an online self repair and free encyclopedias. How does it come from and who can contribute to it. And he also compares it with the traditional printed encyclopedias which created and worked by the “expert” approach.
He presents Wikipedia as a model and discusses it in many ways. The key of this model is free and fluid. It is open to anyone and the information may update any time. I think Wikipedia makes more sense than the traditional encyclopedias. People who edit in Wikipedia wants to contribute on it and share their knowledge with other people, not in purpose of harm the project. And it they offer the inaccurate information which misleading readers, other “crowd of amateurs” may find this error and correct freely and quickly.
For the “Crowd of amateurs” such as encyclopedias like Wikipedia, it is “fluid, fast, fixable, and free.” Anyone can contribute to it and made it better. However, the information they provide may radicalness or misleading people. But like the printed encyclopedias, their knowledge is limited. Just like the “expert” approach. Ignore this fact, the “expert” approach is more neutrality than “Crowd of amateurs”, all the articles are written without any bias.
Like the example gives in “The books stop here”, “Wikipedians are directed not to take a stand on controversial subjects like abortion or global warming but to fairly represent all sides.” Here we can see that neutrality is important to any encyclopedias; not only in “expert”, but also in “crowd of amateurs”.
The authority changes in different contexts, from the early autobiography, and then people were trying to get a model to organize those authorities of expert people, people finally learned to use computer to be their medium. For example, in the academic journals, the professor in famous college may consider authority if they teach for many years or published many academic scholar journals. For the books, the author must know if very well in order to write so many words. For Wikipedia, we talked about this above.
For students like me in college, we have to evaluate the quality of an information sources and tell if it is match for our academic writing. My understanding of authority is the library; the books store in the library must be authority. People who published a best seller book must be an expert in it. Also the encyclopedias are authority to me; both published and online. I will get authority from library, and I will use them that I learned to enhance my opinion or cripple others’ opinion. Those authorities will help me to display my thinking. However, when I face to a newest thinking or I never met before during academic work and non-academic work, I will never blindly trust a new authority, I should use more and more knowledge and self-estimation to solve those works.