Talk:Information

From Citizendium
Revision as of 17:21, 22 May 2007 by imported>Greg Woodhouse (information science and information theory)
Jump to navigation Jump to search


Article Checklist for "Information"
Workgroup category or categories Library and Information Science Workgroup [Editors asked to check categories]
Article status Developing article: beyond a stub, but incomplete
Underlinked article? No
Basic cleanup done? Yes
Checklist last edited by Matt Mahlmann 17:04, 8 April 2007 (CDT)

- Versuri 07:42, 2 April 2007 (CDT)

To learn how to fill out this checklist, please see CZ:The Article Checklist.





Advanced status, some progress has been made since the stub status assigned (now over 450 words) Matt Mahlmann 17:04, 8 April 2007 (CDT)

Proper Workgroup?

The article begins by talking about information theory, which is a rather specific area of computer science. If this is to be the focus of the article, then I think the Computer workgroup ought to be the primary workgroup. Initially, I thought library science should not be included at all, but I'm open to the idea that it should be included. Greg Woodhouse 16:34, 22 May 2007 (CDT)

Obviously LIS needs to be included: It's called Library and Information Science, after all. They are the experts about information, taken as a general topic. --Larry Sanger 17:07, 22 May 2007 (CDT)

I'm not so sure. There is little resemblance between information science (which, in my experience, has primarily to do with metadata and categorization of information) and information theory, which has to do with the quantitative analysis of the information content of streams of bits (or qubits in quantum information theory!) That isn't to say there is no room for overlap. If you set out to write a computer program to find books or papers on a given topic, then you will (perhaps without realizing it) deal with both. Information science may provide you with guidelines on how to proceed (particularly if useful metadata is available), but information theory will provide you with a framework for determining how hard you need to work. Greg Woodhouse 17:21, 22 May 2007 (CDT)