(Originally posted to a mailing list discussing Group Psychotherapy and their current thread about Wikipedia)

First, apologies to those of you who are bored by this discussion. I always try to make my posts interesting or at least amusing, but sometimes I fail, and I am not offended by quick deletions of my emails just as I hope none of you are offended when I fairly quickly delete entries about topics like billing practices which have no applicability to me.

For those of you are interested in the discussion about Wikipedia, I would encourage you to read David Weinberger’s excellent blog entry, Why the media can't get Wikipedia right. For those of you particularly concerned about credentials, David has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto and is a research fellow at the Berkman Institute for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

I mention David’s background, because I believe that one of the key underlying issues of Wikipedia is credibility. I believe that the Internet, and particularly online groups where we do not meet people face to face, where we may not know what degrees a person has, or even their real name raises important questions about credibility and with it authority.

I mention the issue of authority, because I believe this Group Relations conference I ever went to was entitled something like “Authority Leadership and the Global Community”. It seems as if you can’t have a group relations conference without Authority or some closely related term in the title of the conference.

To me, the sense of realness or authenticity becomes tied up in this discussion, because I suspect that these days senses of credibility and authority in online environments may be more dependent on the perceived realness or authenticity than on traditional credentials.

As a side note, Dr. Weinberger had a post recently a Christmas wish where he suggested, “Jesus was God's blog… I suppose the Talmud would be God's blog for the Jews”. To which one wag posted a dyslexic version of the great Internet saying, “On the Internet, no one knows you're a god.”

Back on track, it seems as if the discussions around the nature of credibility and authority in online communities can provide very useful teachable moments as people struggle with their own relationship with authority in whatever group they happen to be in. Hopefully, even this can be a learning experience for some of us.