Group items tagged

This is an article that discusses the views of professional historians regarding wikipedia. I think it makes a number of interesting claims both regarding the management or historical data and wikipedia's role in promoting a particular historical paradigm.

Fascinating article on truth and verifiability on Wikipedia. The author is an expert on the Haymarket labor riots, but finds this still does not qualify him to edit the Wikipedia entry on the topic.

"Print will survive. Books will survive even longer. It's print as a marker of prestige that's dying." Discusses Wikipedia as an extension of its predecessors' vanity and inherent print medium. 

And we know we couldn't avoid adding the thoughts of Michael Scott on the use of Wikipedia. Obviously, some of our sources seem to take a more genuine approach at propagating the veracity of Wikipedia, but the Office's use of Michael Scott as a supporter does represent people's general fear of the quality of contributor on the site.

New project called Wikidata aims to automate some aspects of Wikipedia.

Here's an interesting interview with N. Katherine Hayles (author of this week's readings) for a program called The Artist's Craft. Hayles talks about some of the concepts found in this week's readings and also touches upon some new ideas. I find the material to be extremely accessible in this Q&A format.

This is a module that traces the evolution of the Republican candidates' Wikipedia pages during the course of the primaries. Some of the yahoo user comments at the bottom of the page are quite entertaining too

An article by one of my favorite authors on the "fact-encirclingly huge" Wikipedia.

Is taking from Wikipedia plagiarism? This French author cut and paste freely. This is interesting since it's such a constant argument with students in 101 and 102.

This is related to my previous post on the SOPA backlash. Wikipedia decided to change domains based on GoDaddy's support for SOPA.

This is a google book that discusses some of the same things I mentioned in my post regarding the use of wikipedia and other networks and how that shapes our ideas of freedom.

Another article on the Wikidata development.

This blogger makes some really great points extending Joseph Reagle's ('The Argument Engine' in Wikipedia Reader) ideas of the filter than publish principle of academic publications. Haranguing the filter than publish operation, this author writes how the peer review system adulterates the author's real content writing, "In the conventional peer review system, you seek to please the reviewers who in turn try to please the editor who in turn is trying to guess what the readers want."

Interesting process of Wikipedia's response to really poorly done political commentary on its site.

This a brief look at combining some linguistic approaches to the content of wikipedia and asking questions about the shaping of the meaning of words.

Considering how often we look at TED talks, I thought it might be worth including this fake TED talk used as a clip for the new Ridley Scott movie, Prometheus. I know this probably looks a little like getting off track, but I thought it was interesting that the author claims that humans have become gods through their acts of technological creation (in his case, "cyberkinetic individuals). Science fiction often does a great job extrapolating certain ideas or issues, and I think in some ways we can find links to the issue and use of Wikipedia in which we can freely take place in the act of creation or manipulation of a text and even the meaning behind the entries we change. Obviously this is not necessarily created in our own image the way a cyborg would be, but it is still using McLuhan's idea of the extension of man into the cyber world. The question we're left with here though, is whether or not we deserve the moniker of "creator" if we create anonymously.

Pretty pointed prophesying from Wales here.

I had to share this because it's just too funny but also seems to make an interesting critique on the problems with fact checking and collaborative and anonymous contributions to an encyclopedia. It also seems to make a commentary on how we establish relevancy by adding items (including ourselves) to these kinds of encyclopedias.