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Roy Rosenzweig's article Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past, discusses many issues regarding collaboration, with a focus on its historical entries. One of the most interesting points Rosenzweig makes, is that the contributors on Wikipedia, "do not come from a cross-section of the world's population. They are more likely to be English-speaking, males, and denizens of the Internet" (Rosenzweig, 2006, p. 127). Rosenzweig explains that as a collaborative medium, Wikipedia articles show bias towards Western culture and 'nerdy' topics such as computer science, physics and math (Rosenzweig, 2006, p. 127-128). This is interesting information to apply to Surowiecki's idea of 'the wisdom of crowds' (Surowiecki, 2004, p. 5). Is Wikipedia only representative of the wisdom of white, western, geek crowd? While this article was written back in 2006, I still find it makes some very interesting points about Wikipedia and the collaboration process, which are still applicable today. I also found this article valuable, as unlike a lot of other articles that focus mainly on the author's research which was generally conducted on a very small number of Wikipedia entries, Rosenzweig only discusses the research of others. Rosenzweig cites a range of academics that have compared Wikipedia with other encyclopaedias such as, American National Biography Online, Encarta, Columbia Encyclopaedia, and Britannica; providing the reader with an overview of the different research available and the findings made.

References Rosenzweig, R. (2006). Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past. The Journal of American History, 93, 117-146. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/ Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few. New York, NY: Doubleday.

The many critiques in the article provide good fodder for the academic seeking to justify their position one way or the other. Us users of Wikipedia and traditional books know that Wikipedia works just as we know government process has major flaws. In my personal experience it is Wikipedia that is the most accurate source of information when compared to books on the subject of my father's country of birth. Prior to Wikipedia the books were full of misinformation or no information influenced by politics. So for the purpose of studying internet collaboration - I think this paper gives good argument. Even the people that experience history do not recall it exactly the same.

Ball, P. (2007, February 27). The more, the wikier. Nature: International weekly journal of Science. Retrieved from http://www.nature.com The More, The Wikier is an article published on Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science, which explores the secret behind the quality of Wikipedia entries when anyone, anywhere has the ability to write and edit content. The article looks at three groups of researchers who "claim to have untangled the process by which many Wikipedia entries achieve their impressive accuracy". Wikipedia is an organisation in which users collaborate their knowledge to create an encyclopedia of information. "The percentage of edits made by the Wikipedia 'élite' of administrators" is steadily declining and "Wikipedia is now dominated by users who are much more numerous than the elite but individually less active." "The wisdom of the crowds" principle suggests that the combined knowledge of a large and diverse group is superior to the knowledge of a few experts. Ball explains that content accuracy and quality of Wikipedia articles is related to a high number of edits by a large number of users. For example, articles that deal with very topical issues receive a higher level of attention from a large and diverse audience and therefore are of higher quality than articles that are not as topical and thus do not attract the same attention. The three research groups referenced in the article are: Dennis Wilkinson and Bernardo Huberman of Hewlett Packard's research laboratories who studied how a high number of edits by a large number of users create the 'best' Wikipedia articles, Aniket Kittur of the University of California, and co-workers who explored how the Wiki community has evolved from a small governing group to a democracy, and Ofer Arazy and colleagues at the University of Alberta who discuss the importance of this diversification of Wikipedia contributors to the overall success of its articles.

This article takes a look at the crowd sourcing idea that Wikipedia thrives on. 'Lots of edits by lots of people'. Crowd sourcing makes use of the knowledge of crowds. The more people you have contributing information to an article the more information the article will contain. This is however affected when fewer people begin to contribute to the writing and collaboration process. A person contributing to the Wikipedia page may only be making a change as small as a simple grammatical correction but it means quite a lot to the overall aesthetic of the page. People are far less likely to believe the information presented by an article filled with errors and punctuation problems. It might seem like a small issue but this is how many hands make light work. Wikipedia's reliability comes from its ability to be edited by many people with small alterations. It is strange however that in your other article regarding Wikipedia being its own worst enemy you have points made there of why Wikipedia is leaning towards extinction. These mainly are concerned with the decreasing number of people editing. So is Wikipedia going to stay strong or will it slowly become just another encyclopedia?

Ball's article highlights the successful nature of Wikipedia's open source network and how quality of information is achieved. He suggests that the 'secret' to Wikipedia's credibility is the increasing number of contributors and the 'diversification' it brings to the platform through collective knowledge (Ball, 2007). I can relate Ball's article to Surowiecki's (2004) article Wisdom of the Crowds because it reinforces the notion that people must be unrelated, independent, and have diversity of mind from one another to form good opinions. The architecture of the collaborative platform Wikipedia harnesses the 'power of the crowds' in such a way that encourages diverse participation, as opposed to a group-think scenario, and thus produces 'wisdom' through quality information (Surowiecki, 2004, p5). Ball observes that Wikipedia's structure allows for an above average quality of information on more topical articles. This occurs because popular topics create more traffic, which in turn enables more contributors to edit an article and therefore creating more 'diverse' and 'reliable' information (Ball, 2007). This reinforces the quality of an article through diversification and mass collaboration. This notion of 'quality' can be applied to the Kony 2012 campaign page on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kony_2012), which has been edited over 500 times and has been viewed 1,227,982 times since 6 March 2012, when the Kony 2012 campaign was first launched (Wikipedia Article Page Statistics, 2012). However, it is at this point that the similarities between Ball and Surowiecki cease. According to Ball, the Kony 2012 Wikipedia article is a prime example of a topical issue. The statistics reinforce his observations about Wikipedia's crowds and how they are able to create credible and reliable information due to diversification brought into the article by 1,227,98

In the article, Collaboration in context: Comparing article evolution among subject disciplines in Wikipedia, the writers Katherine Ehmann, Andrew Large and Jamshid Beheshti, compare a small selection of articles - some newly created, and some well-established - from three subject disciplines - the hard sciences, soft sciences and humanities - in order to examine the article quality, how it differs from discipline to discipline and if it changes over time (Ehmann, Large & Beheshti, 2008). One of the most interesting findings that was published in this article was that, contrary to previous research (Brandle, 2005; Dondio, et al., 2006; Lig, 2004; Stvilia, et al., 2005a, 2008; Wilkinson and Huberman, 2007), the articles used that had a greater number of edits than the others, were not the articles of the highest quality (Ehmann, Large & Beheshti, 2008). Wikipedia articles on average retained 90.3 percent of their original text and in general, only small edits were made over time (Ehmann, Large & Beheshti, 2008). I believe these new findings still support, 'the wisdom of crowds' theory though (Surowiecki, 2004, p. 5). Even though a large portion of the text remains from the original contributor, the small edits by other contributors over time, still help to fine-tune the article's meaning and readability. The authors' exploration into Wikipedia Talk pages is also of interest, especially how these places aided the collaboration and coordination process and how this in turn contributed to the quality of articles in Wikipedia (Ehmann, Large & Beheshti, 2008). While Ehmann, Large and Beheshti only studied a small number of articles, and another study is required which examines a larger number of articles, in order to make more conclusive findings, I think this article is still a useful resource (Ehmann, Large & Beheshti, 2008). It is constructive to compare this article's findings to the findings in the Rosenzweig article (Rosenzweig, 2006).

I think this article is interesting and pointed wisdom of crowd cannot bring high quality for Wikipedia's article. Talk pages are playing important role in Wikipedia, editors post their suggestion there and other active editors come and follow them or put other suggestion to make a more credible article (in Talk pages the most request belonged to the suggestion for editing and completeness had the less request followed by accuracy and accessibility) (Beheshti, Ehmann & Large, 2088). According to my own research, one of the important things, which mentions in talk pages is about sources of articles which can take a place as print resources, deep web resources external links and inexact references. Disagreement about content of articles is another important subject in Wikipedia and before an article edited, editors discuss in talk pages about adding controversial material or removing content, and then they get a decision to how edit the article. Talk pages may use to notify other users to know this article had recent edit or editors ask their questions there from other or they request for help. However, the author mentioned participation of contributors on different topics is different. There are many articles which have only one comment on their talk page and there is large number of articles who has various comment and suggestions on their talk page (Breslin, Passant & Schneider, 2010). Breslin, J, G., A, Passant. & Schneider, J. (2010). A content analysis: How Wikipedia talk pages are used. 7. Retrieved from http://journal.webscience.org/373/2/websci10_submission_80.pdf

Collaboration in Context takes an in-depth view at the collaboration which produces Wikipedia pages. I was attracted to this resource in that I imagined it would assist me in understanding how users interacted in a organised context - ie. the mindsets of users collaborating on a specific, and, in the case of many Wikipedia pages, complex, task. Whilst the paper examines the development of pages from a 'contributor's' point of view, it does this through statistical interpretation of a set of data the authors assembled on page edits. The result is that the paper doesn't so much uncover the nuances of collaboration in an organisational setting, as relate the nuts and bolts of page editing. Perhaps, the mores of collaboration might be inferred from this reading of Wikipedia's collaborative process, though I found it difficult to see this in numbers rather than testimony from wikipedians themselves. What this paper does do is highlight the efficacy of 'talk pages' in the process of building of 'rich' Wikipedia entries. These forums provide the engine of collaboration on Wikipedia - users able to get together as a group to uncover the most efficient ways to combine their work - the paper concluding, "Talk pages - in addition to article edits themselves - provide wikipedians with a powerful means of shaping the presentation of knowledge. (chap.8)" This information is useful to me in the way I will be able to compare it to the, say, simpler, and more spontaneous collaboration of strangers in bittorrent which does not require a 'talk page'. What I would have liked to have known is how the 'talk' on these pages allowed networks of 'equal' users to perfect articles on complex topics, and what the users themselves thought of the arrangement.

Manjoo, F. (2009, September 28). Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success? Time Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/magazine Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success? is an article which suggests Wikipedia's achievement level has reached its peak and eventually will see its downfall. The article looks in depth at the potential causes for Wikipedia's slowing growth and how these elements could possibly lead to the community's eventual failure. It suggests one reason for Wikipedia's decelerating growth rate is simply that "the site has hit the natural limit of knowledge expansion" and the only possible remaining contributions are obscure topics and "janitorial" editing job such as formatting and fixing grammar. The article claims "Wikipedia's natural resource is emotion" and editors are motivated by the "rush of joy" they receive when contributing their unique wisdom to an audience of 300 million people. What this means is that as the need for significant edits diminishes, so too does participation enthusiasm. Additionally, as Wikipedia has grown, so too has the bureaucracy and complex laws of Wikipedia, resulting in a community that has become unwelcoming to novice Wikipedians. The article discusses how Wikipedia editors are made up of a narrow class of participants dominated by young males from wealthy countries and academic backgrounds. The Wikipedia author-base is not as broad and diverse as first thought and it seems "the encyclopedia is missing the voices of people in developing countries, women and experts in various specialties that have traditionally been divorced from tech". This too is given as a reason for Wikipedia's imminent downfall.

This article brings up a very interesting idea: the concept of an endpoint for Web 2.0 communities. As the author relates it, this would occur as a Malthusian collapse. Whilst at first glance this seems unfeasible given the infinite expanse of virtual pastures, the article makes some interesting points for consideration: the number of contributors on Wikipedia is dropping and it seems the we have run out of topics to write. It is interesting to compare the Wikipedia community to that of Bittorrent which has found renewed growth, and purpose, in the context of its struggle against copyright laws. Wikipedia has been hailed as a revolutionary form of knowledge democratisation, it is hard to imagine that wikipedians don't share a sense of purpose in their collaboration, and, perhaps even harder to imagine that we are running out of things to write about. Whilst this article is from a highly reputable source, its bias might be considered in following that of the conservative media toward copyleft, this is highlighted by phrases like 'Wikipedia's joyride' which suggests the growth of the site as frivolous. Considering the data it presents, the article is certainly very relevant to an understanding of online collaboration and thought provoking. I cannot help but think that there are still multitudes of topics to be written about, how many contributors, for example, have penned a page for themselves? Whilst ostensibly trivial, this might be the kind of interaction that sees renewed interest in the site and attracts the minority demographics which Gardner says the site needs to make its community richer (p.2). Perhaps the flagging interest in the site comes from the reason that the site is moving too close to the status quo, that as the BitTorrent community has seen, it needs to reminded of its position in an ideological shift.

This article starts with a brief summary of Wikipedia's start. Wikipedia started its work in 2001 and allowed Wikipedia's to contribute and share their articles with others through it. Wikipedia increased its article slowly, in 2008 there were about 2200 articles being added to the Wikipedia every day and in 2009 Wikipedia had about 3 million articles in English. So, Wikipedia broken the record held by Chinese Yongle encyclopedia, which was the famous encyclopedia (Manjoo, 2009). According to my own studies, Wikipedia has different level of articles; they divided to low-, medium- and high quality and different people must play different roles, such as linking, editing and writing. For example, cleaning up other editor's mistake is a very important part, because some people do not add valuable information and some editors must come to increase articles quality and maybe the article needs another editor to correct the article again and this process may need to continue many times to increase quality of that article. However, that does not mean casual users work is not worthy, because, they can absorb more well-rounded contributors to make more valuable articles. To help contributors, University of Arizona suggested Wiki software, which guides contributors to know what should they do, for example, they will aware the article needs more link, references or it needs more editing and writing (Conger, 2010). Conger, C. (2010). Who writes Wikipedia articles? Retrieved from http://news.discovery.com/human/wikipedia-community-articles.html

Petray, T.L. (2011). Protest 2.0: Online Interactions and Aboriginal Activists. Media, Culture and Society, 33(6), 923-940. Retrieved March 25, 2012, from Sage Journals Database. http://mcs.sagepub.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/content/33/6/923.full.pdf+html This article conveys, that while it is necessary to utilize the tools made available by the digital age, they "should be used to enhance offline activism, rather than to replace it" (p.936). The author has studied an Aboriginal community in Townsville, and the difficulties that activists have faced in gaining momentum in a digital space. Unlike the young tech-savvy protestors in the Arab uprising, or the destructive youths in the London riots, the participants in this community are older and not comfortable with new technology. In this remote community, emails have been favoured when conveying information and organizing meetings online (p.927). However, this has caused difficulties in the disjointed fragmentation of messages, as well as, interfering with a culture that values visual storytelling over the written word (p.930; 927). Similar to, Climate Camp in the UK, the community may have benefited from using some Internet tools, however, face-to-face meetings were found to be more effective when collaborating and organising events. To further their presence online, the group created a Facebook page, allowing people to donate money and support them. However, the lack of success in gaining political momentum is linked to the participants and the current nature of online activism. Whilst the page can facilitate collaboration and organisation, it lost its momentum in the lack of group activity and recent updates (p.933). Due to the current nature of online activism, people can simply 'like' a page or sign a petition to show their support towards a cause, with little to no effort (p

Whilst I totally agreed with the concluding points of this article I found it very hard to identify just which topic this article had the greatest relevance to. It is a reliable source as it is associated with the James Cook University and the author has positioned themselves within the community they are researching. I could draw similarities with one of my articles, Public Radio's Social Media Experiments: Risk, Opportunity, Challenge, (Levenshus, 2007) in that they both reference a resistance to social media opportunities. The reasons for this 'resistance' in both articles could be put down to a lack of knowledge, resource allocation and institutional culture or 'cultural explainations' (Petray, 2011, p. 927). The understanding that 'push-button activism' was more of a feeling of evolvement rather than the translation of any 'real participation', supports the articles offer of a resolution. Any negative ideals about cyber-activism are squashed by the simple resolution of combining offline infrastructures with the online and not just relying on either one. Overall I thought this article was a breath of fresh air. Whilst I realise that 'cyber-activism' has been in the spotlight a lot lately due to the Kony 2012 campaign, I was delighted to read an article that turns its attention to local activism. Aboriginal cultures have always maintained my interest and just recently I viewed the 'Tall Man' exhibition that dealt with the Palm Island death in custody referred to in the article. It had a profound affect on me. I also appreciate that preserving oral histories and the rite to communicate in ones own language has deeply embedded social issues within Australia. This is another reason why this articles direct referencing of Aboriginal activism is refreshing and of great value. Equal access to social technologies is so very important in closing the digital divide both globally and locally. As the article points out only '25%' of the globe have such access (P

Reference: Levenshus, A. 2007. Public Radios Social Media Experiments: Risk, Opportunity, Challenge. Retrieved from http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/sites/default/files/public_radio_report3.pdf

Steal this Film is a documentary about bittorrent culture centred around the story of the Swedish torrent tracking website The Pirate Bay. In telling their story, the Pirate Bay members relate quite early on that they are not only a filesharing website but also an organisation for free speech. We see bittorrent organisations as situated within the wider context of media piracy and filesharing networks as clandestine organisations that must be diffuse in order to evade detection by anti p2p groups. The Pirate Bay's struggle against media outlets is elevated to a battle against American cultural hegemony. Within this context Kent's (2011) reading of the swarm as a simulacra of group identity can be seen as a defence - a tactic - as deCerteau (1984) puts it for the weak to re-appropriate the power of the strong. Filesharing is a form of protest. By publicising their struggle, The Pirate Bay build a bridge between physical and virtual communities. The film features spontaneous interviews with people on the street."The internet is too big, you can't fight it, (27mins)" says a girl with blue hair. Is she referring to the network of computers which make up the internet, or the strength of communities which practice filesharing, the linkages and solidarity of people across the world? This footage awakens the reader's conceptions of a link between physical and virtual activities, online collaboration breeds a solidarity between users which can echo beyond the activities of the swarm. We see bittorrent used not solely as a method for obtaining entertainment but as a vehicle for ideological struggle. The faces in the movie are conspicuously youthful and one sees that they collaborate not only in terms of files but also in ideas and viewpoints. We see bittorrent as a tool for worldwide collaboration/change. References Certeau, M. (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, Berkeley. Kent M (2011), 'Strangers in the Sw

Steal this Film, is a short 30-minute documentary that looks at the social politics and debate about file sharing and the bit torrent client, focusing on Swedish torrent tracking website The Pirate Bay. The documentary outlines how file sharing and copyright is a touchy subject within American laws, and through the documentary we are able to hear differing opinions on who is right and who wrong. The various people that are interviewed who are involved with the Pirate Bay take a 'us against the world' approach and make it clear that technically they aren't doing anything wrong, and through the power of free speech they are making their voice heard. Numerous youths are also interviewed and each seem to be of the copyleft opinion that what they are doing is almost some sort of activism, and believe that these torrent communities are un-able to be stopped. I would also have to agree with this as a 'Pirate' myself and also through the learning that I have undertaken while at university, that this excuse by the Movie/Music industry that they aren't being hurt through piracy is totally utterly false and I think as one of the speakers in the video says "We aren't going to wake up one day and find that all music artists have died because of Piracy". In fact I would go as far to say that because of this cry-baby outlook by these industries that the bit torrent and file-sharing communities have been strengthened because of it.

I was taken aback when I went to download 'Steal This Film' and it popped up as a torrent file in BitTorrent. I suppose I wasn't used to, what I perceived as, 'legitimate' content being provided in the form of a torrent. The film stated, "right now ten million people are using BitTorrent" and indeed, at the time of watching, I was also using BitTorrent. One of the things I found admirable, and also a little surprising, was the resilience of the Pirate Bay founders. Even after being raided and shut down by the authorities, their belief in what they were doing, and their advocacy of free speech, was too strong to just let go. I also found the film interesting in its depiction of the various anti piracy campaigns created by Hollywood film studios juxtaposed with the interviews of young people claiming that the amount of money made by Hollywood is "absurd". Even if crew members and writers are suffering at the hands of film piracy, like the people interviewed, I find it difficult to sympathise with Hollywood's view point when you can safely assume that the largest chunk of proceeds made from any film go to the 'talent' and not those people working so hard behind the scenes. Perhaps Hollywood losing money could be considered a positive outcome, as so many subpar films probably should never have been made in the first place. Perhaps having less money to fund any film on a whim will lead film studios to choose their projects more carefully, resulting in the delivery of quality rather than quantity to film consumers.

This is an extremely interesting article as it focuses on the ways in which wikis have excelled in enticing people into contributing and exciting them about making contributions. Businesses and organizations can learn a lot from this article as it also illustrates ways in which a wiki can be used to increase the rate, amount and quality of contribution. The precise nature of Wikipedia is one of the greatest advantages it has over other information sources. People looking for information find their topic and the information provided is in a formatted style that is maintained throughout the site. The limited security measures on Wikipedia allow people to contribute what they wish with minimal restrictions. The question is however can a wiki such as Wikipedia be used effectively to add value and increase collaboration within a business environment? Wikipedia does allow users to contribute information and remove the barriers and restrictions of both geographic and social status. This can allow bias or ill-informed information to be present in articles. Within a business structure there is little to no chance of purposely misleading information being presented to the articles. This does remove one of the major problems that Wikipedia faces as the integrity of information is assured. So with this in mind does a wiki remain a great resource for collaboration within a business environment?

Overall, this article provides a nice summary of how businesses and corporations can employ wikis in their knowledge production, highlighting some of the advantages and disadvantages and discussing some troubleshooting problems. Yeo (2010) notes that an added benefit of using wikis in businesses is that multiple people can work on a document at once, allowing multiple editors to work on different sections of the wiki at the same time. However where companies may struggle is with the layout and formatting of the page. Hasan and Pfaff (2006) note that IBM, the Disney Corporation, and British Telecommunications are just some of the major corporations that have successfully implemented the use of wikis into their business structure. The Shell Corporation is yet another business that has successfully employed the use of wikis in their organisation (Hendrix & Johannsen, 2008). Similarly, the revision history and ability to track editing changes made to pages is a common advantage running across all of these studies. Although this article offers a nice description of how wikis can be used in businesses, it does not delve into the world of knowledge management and using wikis as a knowledge sharing platform, as discussed by Hasan and Pfatt (2006). They also fail to provide strategies to motivate employees to make use of the wiki and participate in knowledge contribution, as mentioned by Hendrix and Johannsen (2008). Nevertheless, the article makes us aware about wikis and how they can be incorporated in businesses, noting some of the advantages and limitations. Additional References: Hasan, H., & Pfaff, C.C. (2006). The wiki: an environment to revolutionise employees' interaction with corporate knowledge. OZCHI. 11(24-26). Pp377-380. Retrieved 19th March 2012 from http://www.ozchi.org/proceedings/2006/sessions/short-papers/social/hasan-p377.pdf Hendrix, D., & Johannsen, G. (May 16th, 2008). A knowledge sharing and collaboration platform. Inside Knowledg

This article related to my topic discussed about how Wikipedia as one of the popular online collaborative encyclopedias allows everyone to write and read its article for free and there are large numbers of businesses all around the world who edit and publish its articles (Yeo, 2010). According to my own studies, Wikipedia will be good for small businesses? Wikipedia as a popular online community can help small businesses to have an article there. Of course, everyone can make a page in Wikipedia, but, having a page for businesses can bring more customers for them, for example, Zip's Drive-In has article in Wikipedia which gives information to people about its fast foods. Tekserve, sales Apple products in New York, has a Wikipedia article to gives beneficial information about their new products and absorb them on their own blog. Or even "Hollywood-based Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles" has article in Wikipedia (Mcgee, 2009). But why businesses want to have an article in Wikipedia? They can have great exposure of their new products: when a company has article in Wikipedia that means more people all over the world can read their information that brings them more exposure. They can manage their information and their through Wikipedia and people know Wikipedia as a trustable resource. Moreover, Wikipedia gives permission to businesses to update their articles, and with the help of Talk page they can read customers wishes and suggestion (Mcgee, 2009). However, businesses must aware there in Wikipedia there will be some angry customers and they may edit their articles, so, businesses should aware to correct any untruthful information which added by others and it is a truth that monitoring can be very time-consuming for them (Mcgee, 2009). Mcgee, M. (17 september 2009). Should a small business have a Wikipedia article? Available online at: http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/should-small-business-have-wikipedia-article/2311/