Wikipedia

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is Jonathan Morgan, who shifts our focus to Wikipedia. His interest is in how communal values are expressed by participants on the site – for example around specific controversies on the site. His project examined the debates around the Jyllands Posten / Muhammad cartoons controversy; here, the editors who created the Wikipedia entry covering this issue decided to include the offending cartoon in the entry at first, which generated substantial debate.

The site’s professed aim is to empower and engage people around the world, and founder Jimmy Wales has echoed these sentiments in his own statements. Surveys of Wikipedians in the English-language Wikipedia also refer to altruism, reciprocity, sense of community, as well as fun and a sense of mission.

Milwaukee.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2009 is Zack Hayat, whose interest is in active participation on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a space for collaborative content creation as well as for interpersonal interaction (for example through its community portals - or whatever they are positioned as in the various international Wikipedia versions - and discussion pages). There has been exponential growth in Wikipedia participants over the past years, but the number of regular editors has remained relative stable; growth has been mainly in less active editors. Some 60% of Wikipedia has been created by 5% of its users, as Jimmy Wales has said.

Milwaukee.
The next presenter at AoIR 2009 is Ericka Menchen-Trevino, whose interest is in the assessment of the credibility of online information, here especially for Wikipedia content, of course. Wikipedia is now a major source of information, and is used by many users especially also for health information, which is particularly problematic if users do not exercise sufficient caution in using the information provided here.

Ericka examined this by surveying the attitudes of college students towards Wikipedia's credibility; they were asked about specific information-seeking skills, and their actions in information seeking tests were also examined using screen capture and audio/video recording (using hypothetical scenarios).

Milwaukee.
The next speakers at AoIR 2009 are Susan Herring and Ewa Callahan. Susan starts by highlighting Wikipedia's well-known Neutral Point of View (NPOV) policy, but there has been little research into whether its content is truly fair and balanced - even less so across the many different languages across which Wikipedia operates. There is a sense that different versions emphasise 'local heroes', but this too has not been tested.

So, this paper examines the English and Polish Wikipedias. The Polish version is different from the English in that it is specific to one country only, and that there is a very specific cultural background of the language community (and it is also the fourth largest Wikipedia); the English version is the oldest and largest, and is authored by English speakers around the world (but with focus especially on US and UK users, persumably). The paper examined the entries for 15 famous Poles and 15 famous Americans across a variety of different fields of achievement from a structural as well as thematic point of view.

Milwaukee.
The final AoIR 2009 session for the day is on Wikipedia (hmm, so few papers on Wikipedia at this conference - why? just because Twitter is the Next Big Thing now?). We begin with Lindsay Fullerton, who notes the trends in Wikipedia which have been able to be observed over the past few years. In particular, edits of Wikipedia policy texts have substantially increased over time, to the point where there is now more work on Wikipedia policy edits than on actual articles; additionally, of course, there has been a massive growth of Wikipedia editors, levelling off now and standing at around 180,000.

Copenhagen.
After some drama getting here (note to self: Qantas may be in trouble at the moment, but avoid Scandinavian Airlines like the plague), I'm now in Copenhagen, and we're about to start the programme proper of the ninth annual Association of Internet Researchers conference. Although the presentation by Dr. Hala-Seuss which runs in a parallel session was very tempting, I'm starting the day in a session on wikis. Timme Bisgaard Munk is the first presenter, presenting on his study of the Danish Wikipedia.

Singapore.
We're still in the first paper session at ISEA 2008 - but I'll start a new post for the next three presentations. The next speaker is Konrad Becker, who has previously published the Tactical Reality Dictionary and is now working on a Strategic Reality Dictionary to complement it. He notes that tactical media spontaneity nonetheless relies on the availability of underlying infrastructures, raising questions around the strategic dimension. Tactics are more strongly related to temporal considerations, strategies to spatial issues. Konrad now shows a matrix tracing different combinations of space and time, and points to scientific understandings of time and space.

Over the last week or so, there have been quite a few responses to a recent talk by Clay Shirky in which he discusses our collective "cognitive surplus" that is now being harnessed by participatory, Web 2.0, produsage initiatives. Shirky's talk has been praised by some, and condemned by others; negative responses seem to focus especially on his apparent disdain for television, which he describes as a kind of "cognitive heatsink", dispersing surplus cognitive energy. (Skip to about 1:50 in the video below.)

Another quick rumination in response to the Vibewire e-Festival of Ideas discussions. This connects very directly to my research for my latest book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage - chapters 5 through 8, on Wikipedia, folksonomies, and related issues around knowledge management and knowledge organisation, all deal in some detail with the question of how to come to an arrangement between 'folks' and 'experts' which both respects expert knowledge and asserts the equipotentiality of contributors who are not certified experts. Here's what I wrote on that point - comments welcome!

It's interesting that the question of experts is coming up here - it's something I've thought a lot about recently, especially also in relation to the Wikipedia where that problem has been a point of ongoing discussion. There are plenty of good arguments in either direction here (let experts have far greater say than average people vs. follow the common-sense consensus of everyone) - personally, my preference would be for a middle way which respects expert knowledge but also doesn't accept it unquestioningly just because someone has a degree and a position of authority.