The Efficiency Paradox by Edward Tenner

Author:Edward Tenner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

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Search education should begin no later than the first year of high school. Young people are used to casual searching but don’t necessarily know how to refine a search that yields too few or too many results. To its credit, Google has pages of search tips and multiple programs for schools. Taught well, search can become an absorbing challenge, like working a crossword puzzle. As in many word puzzles, search depends on the multiplicity of synonyms for similar ideas. For example, not all articles on the death penalty will include the phrase “capital punishment,” and vice versa, and some may be restricted to issues surrounding lethal injection. Website owners can deal with this issue by creating searchable keywords that do not necessarily occur in the text—one kind of metadata—but many important documents include no keywords. The synonym problem is a challenge to many kinds of electronic search, including the analysis of terabytes of e-mails and other documents in litigation. But the synonym problem is itself an example of the challenge of online resources: as of September 2017 there was still no English-language Wikipedia article devoted to it, though a substantial article, “Controlled Vocabulary,” concerns the efforts of librarians and information scientists to standardize terms for subject indexes. Most people intuitively know what a controlled vocabulary is, but probably few are aware of the term. One advantage of Wikipedia over conventional resources, though, is that users (including undergraduates and even high school students) are able to fill in its gaps. Schools should teach skilled search by encouraging Wikipedia editing.54

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