\section{The Italian context}
Data gathered with key informants and interviewees provide a picture of the Humanities Italian environment state, emphasizing some cultural and institutional issues. 
Key informant Umberto Eco gave insights and meaningful statements that enlighten a cultural situation where scholars and intellectuals are both interested and feared 
by the brand new possibilities offered by the Web. 

This section will investigate topics arise during analysis that enlighten the Italian context, providing a defined framework where to apply further results and outcomes.

\subsection{Eco}
Probably, the best achievement of the present research has been the interview of Umberto Eco as a prominent and important insider of Humanities
in the Italian context. 
Professor Eco is a worldwide known professor and author of best-sellers as \textquotedblleft The Name of the Rose \textquotedblright and 
\textquotedblleft Foucault's Pendulum\textquotedblright.
He is also a medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, literary critic and novelist: he has written from academic texts to children's books, 
as well as many essays regarding very different topics, from politics to literature.

Professor Eco was interviewed by the researcher for a project called \textquotedblleft Wiki@Home\textquotedblright, supported by the Italian chapter of the 
Wikimedia Foundation\footnote{\url{http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home}}, Wikimedia Italia\footnote{\url{http://www.wikimedia.it/index.php/Who_we_are}}. 
Wikimedia Italia (WMI) is an association for open culture and open knwoledge, and it supports Wikimedia projects as Wikipedia and Wikisource. 
Wiki@Home is a subproject of WMI which is aimed to interview important members of the cultural and entertainment world. 

Within this context, the researcher contacted and gained and appointment with professor Eco to interview him about Internet, collaboration and Wikipedia. 
The researcher thus exploited this unique occasion to utilize professor Eco as a \textit{key informant} for the study, 
investigating topics as collaboration between scholars, especially within Humanities in the Italian context. 

Interview revealed to be extremely rich and helpful to gain in-depth information about Humanities in the Italian area and their 
approach to Internet and collaboration. 
%Thus, in the following paragraphs his interview will be analyzed, providing a rich picture of the Italian Humanities environment. 

\subsection{Poor and rich}
Professor Eco was asked many questions regarding collaboration, especially aimed to knowledge production, both in volunteer-driven and scholar projects.
The first outcome of the interview was the a distinction bewtween these two kind of projects, that means a distinction between the communities. 
Moreover, the professor also made a distinction between two kind of \textit{users}.
He stated:
\begin{quotation}
I once made a distinction between things good for the \textit{poor} and things good for the \textit{rich}, where rich and poor have no immediate connotation in terms of money, 
but in terms, say, of cultural evolution... 
A graduate is a rich, an illiterate is poor. 
There can obviously be a big entrepeneur who is poor and a little clerk who is rich.

Television thus is good for the poor and bad for the rich: it taught the poor to speak Italian, it is good for old women who sit alone in the house. 
And it harms the rich because it prevents him to go out and see things more beautiful at the cinema, it narrows his ideas.

The computer in general, and the Internet in particular, is good for the rich and bad for the poor. 
That is, Wikipedia is good for me, because I an able to find the information I need, I do not trust it, because everyone knows that as Wikipedia grows, 
the errors also grow. I found steep follies written about me, and if no-one pointed me at them, they would stay there still.

The rich are grown people, they can compare the information. I look at Wikipedia in Italian, I'm not sure that the news is correct, 
then I go to check the English version, then yet another source, and if all three tell me that this gentleman died in 371 AD I begin to believe it. 
\end{quotation}

Thus, he continued stating that the very problem of Wikipedia and other peer-generated information is always a problem of \textit{filtering}.
\begin{quotation}
So Wikipedia, as the whole Internet, has the problem of \textit{filtering the news}. 
\textit{It keeps both false and real news}; but the rich knows filtering techniques at least for the areas they know how to check. 
[\dots] Collective filtering is useless, since it could yield to fluctuations. 
I noticed that in a certain period of Berlusconi's triumph people went looking for information about me on the right-winged books and placed them in Wikipedia: 
as correctness prevents me from changing them directly, I left them on. But obviously it was an entry made by the winners of the moment.

The collective control is therefore useful up to a certain point: it is conceivable that if one gives a false length of the equator, 
sooner or later someone comes and corrects it, but correction of more subtle and difficult issues is more complicated.
\end{quotation}

According to him, in fact, amateur community cannot really control anything, because there is no mechanism that helps the community keeping in


\subsection{Low and motivated crowd}
Therefore Eco divided the normal, \textquotedblleft low\textquotedblright crowd, which often supports every kind of falsity 
(\textquotedblleft If you ask to 6 billion of inhabitants of the world, the majority will tell you that the Sun is going round the Earth. 
There's nothing to do about it\textquotedblright) to what he called the \textit{motivated crowd},
which can actually create trustworthy information, as (sometimes) happens in Wikipedia.
\begin{quotation}
We must therefore find another criterion, which I think is the \textit{motivated} crowds. 
People who work on Wikipedia are not just an aristocracy, just professors, but they are not the indiscriminate crowd either: 
they are the part of the crowd who feels motivated to work with Wikipedia. 
\end{quotation}

Thus, he continues: 
\begin{quotation}
Here it is: I'd replace the theory of \textquotedblleft wisdom of crowds\textquotedblright with the theory of the \textquotedblleft wisdom of the \textit{motivated} crowds.\textquotedblright 
The general crowd says that we should not pay taxes, the motivated crowd says that it's fair to pay them. 
In fact, it is not a digger or an illiterate who contributes on Wikipedia, but someone who already belongs to a cultural crowd for the very fact of using a computer. 
\end{quotation}


\subsection{Italian scholars are quite behind}
Professor Eco confirmed the idea of a generation of Italian scholars that is particularly unaware of the new aspect of the Web, 
and it is quite diffident about new directions of scrince and scholarship, as well as a disruptive technology as Internet, with the whole bargain of innovation carried.

\section{Solving authorship}
\begin{quotation}
Many scholars, particularly in the humanities, are often only used to working independently. 
Another difficulty with collaboration can be clear roles and responsibilities in terms of Authorship. If several humanities scholars work together on a collaborative 
digital project that both wish to use for promotion and tenure, not having clear levels of responsibility can be challenging.
\end{quotation}

Interviewee \texttt{I5} stated:
\begin{quotation}
We need to state again that, so far, in humanities, work has been primarily individual. 
There is the \textit{myth of the lonely scholar}, as they say in the Anglo-Saxon area. At the same time, there is the \textit{myth of the lonely author}. 
It is a romantic idea, where the author, the scholar, is always working alone: this is still true.
When you make a research in hard science, it is often a collaborative team work. 
In humanities you use need to go in a library, in an archive, in your \textit{scriptorium} and write until you have finished you work.
How much Digital Humanities have changed this behavior and culture needs still to be assessed.
\end{quotation}

\begin{quotation}
Hence, on one side,in the humanities, we have the individual work.
In philological sciences, in particular, there is one thing not to be underestimated: 
We read an edition of a particular curator or publisher because we know that he is an international expert.
I can read the Petrocchi's critical edition of Dante over another because I prefer, I respect, I trust more that curator or publisher.
In humanities and philological sciences the author, the scholar is king.
\end{quotation}
 