Paul Duguid is adjunct professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information; professorial research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London; and research fellow at the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University. His interest in multidisciplinary, collaborative work has led him to work with social scientists, computer scientists, economists, linguists, management theorists, and social psychologists.

Professor Duguid co-wrote (with John Seely Brown) The Social Life of Information, a seminal book in which the authors argue that the impact of information technology cannot be fully understood outside of the social context in which it is used. He teaches a course at the School of Information entitled The Quality of Information along with Professor Geoff Nunberg.

1. As a researcher, you’re interested in the quality of information. How do you measure the quality of information on the Web?

There's no short answer to that question.  If there is a simple point to the class Geoff Nunberg and I teach (and when Geoff and I get together simple points are few), it’s that the various rules or guides put forward for assessing quality or identifying "rotten information" on the Web rarely work. They don't work because quality is highly variable. (A "bad" web site is, after all, good data for people like Marti Hearst and Doug Tygar, who are doing great research into phishing.) And they don't work because the people trying to peddle rotten information probably read the rules more closely than anyone else — then route around them. Assessing quality is a highly "situated" activity. But it’s one that we engage in all the time. If we are a little more self-conscious about the resources we bring to familiar circumstances, then we can start to adapt these and supplement them in the new worlds of the Web.

2. In January 2006, the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia made headlines when deliberately false information was posted about John Siegenthaler, founding editorial director of USA Today. How has this incident affected the way people view information on the Web? And what are the implications for the future of the Web as a knowledge source?

I don't know that the Siegenthaler problem has changed the way that people look at the Web as a whole, but it has made some people a little more cautious about Wikipedia, which is a good thing. I've drawn flack for criticising Wikipedia, but criticism is what it needs. Unfortunately, discussions tend to collapse into cheering or booing. As the Wikipedians' reply to their critic puts it, "Some are nearly instantly hooked, and love the idea; others think the idea is so absurd as not to require any serious consideration" Now there's an awful lot of ground between those two extremes, and that's where "serious consideration" should take place. It might be wiser to stop proclaiming "it works" (or doesn't work) and to start thinking about where it works well and where it works not so well, and how to make the weaker bits stronger.

3.  If much of the information available on the Internet is flawed, what role can academia play in changing the behavior of well-intentioned but ill-informed “authors”?

The Net is pretty bruising territory. Ill-informed authors usually hear about it — though there are far reaches of the Web that remind me of pub poetry readings you could inadvertently stumble on in New York in the 80s, where everyone came to read and no one came to listen, so preciousness and pretentiousness went unmolested. Elsewhere on the net, reaching the incautious or ill-advised reader is probably more important than going after authors. I don't think there's a lot of mileage in insisting that students don't use the Web, but there's a lot to be said for exposing the weakness of arguments, presentations, or papers that rely on bad information — wherever it's found.

4. Libraries and publications were once the only source of the both researchers and casual information seekers now look for on the Web. Is there anything we can learn about ensuring information accuracy from the traditional library/publishing model?

Botched newspaper stories, bogus memoirs, fake scientific evidence have not done much to bolster the old way of doing things, but because rotten information can get through a quality control systes doesn't necessarily mean you should throw away the whole system. In a comparison of old and new, I read my way through all the articles used in Nature's December comparison of Britannica and Wikipedia and came to the conclusion that we shouldn't worry so much about Britannica or Wiki, but about Nature. It was a silly hatchet job that undermined the integrity of the journal, even though they have since tried to erect a firewall between their scholarly and their journalistic pursuits. (That Nature was arguing, on the one hand, in favour of intellectual integrity, while revealing it had little, and on the other, in favour of the public domain, while it is one of the most expensive and restrictive journals available in the market, made the event particularly bizarre.) Nevertheless, while there are cascades of interesting entries on Wikipedia that would never see the light of day in Britannica, if I was rooting for facts on a topic I knew little about but that would put my reputation on the line, I wouldn't hesitate in turning to Britannica or to the ODNB or a similar weighty institution — for all their fallibilities — because in the end their reputation is on the line too, and that's important. But it isn't really old versus new, the new have had a serious effect on the old. Britannica and the ODNB and similar traditional reference sources now live on the Web primarily, and they rush to change errors when they are pointed out. The ODNB has even learned to date its revisions. It would be good if the rise of Wikis would start to push these institutions out from behind their protective firewalls, but that's going to require some seriously different business models.

5. What are some of your favorite sites to visit on the Web?

I'm an inveterate news and blog reader. I've read Slashdot almost daily since its early days, and I scan a handful of left and right blogs most mornings to see what bricks they are heaving at each other. I appreciate the work Jay Rosen does on the press, Juan Cole on Iraq, and Brad DeLong on economics. An expat, I also look at the Guardian and BBC news sites regularly. I think both are in the forefront of moving old media onto new media. I also look at some European newspapers (liberation.fr, publico.pt) to see what life looks like outside the anglo bubble.

6. In your multidisciplinary career you’ve collaborated with social scientists, computer scientists, economists, linguists, management theorists, and social psychologists. What do you consider the three keys to successful collaboration when many perspectives (and agendas) are at the table?

I don't know that I've three rules for collaboration. Having watched my share of interdisciplinary institutes explode, I firmly believe that such collaboration is hard and platitudes and good will aren't enough to live on when the real differences between disciplines emerge. It's often been observed that when people come together for such work they endanger their disciplinary ties. As a result, when the interdisciplinary going gets tougher, understandably, people will revert to those ties as a kind of comfort food, in the process making the collaborative going only tougher.

7. What’s the best thing about teaching at the I School?

In the nineties a bunch of schools felt that they needed to have an I school but they didn't really know what it was that they needed to have. It's enjoyable and intriguing to be associated with people who are trying to answer the question. I was lucky enough to spend some time at Xerox PARC, which had been set up to pursue the "architecture of information", although no one had a clue what that meant. So you can get a long way with an ill-formed question.

8. What's the best part of your work day and why?

Lunch. Because I tend to spend it reading things I don't have to read and I always enjoy eating.

9. Tell us a little about your life outside the realm of information. What do you do for fun?

To prevent my penchant for eating going too heavily to my waist, my indefatigable wife tends to make me take a lot of exercise, so (in winter at least) dawn sometimes finds us cycling through Tilden Park or swimming in Hearst Pool, which, if you can get through the painful parts before you come to consciousness, is a very exhilarating and very Californian pleasure (down Liverpool way, you tend to get frowned on for running around in spandex in the early hours).

10. At the I School, we're educating the next generation of human-friendly knowledge leaders. What are we doing right? What boat might we be missing?

The school is undoubtedly getting a lot right and its students are admirably friendly, but to take up your metaphor, I suspect that all schools today, for unimpeachable reasons, tend to miss a boat without a rudder, a craft that would allow students to drift and meander a little more. I'd hesitate to ask students what novel or other book that has absolutely nothing to do with their coursework or careers they might be reading. It almost seems subversive to do so. The I school does well educating knowledge leaders, but we should also hope for knowledgeable leaders with breadth as well as focus. I submitted an article to a journal not long ago and pretentiously quoted Aristotle. When I got an editorial note back asking me for the author's first name it made me pause to wonder whether we might all be a little too focussed.