Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-17/In the news
Why Wikipedia survives while others haven't; Wikipedia as an emerging social model; Jimbo speaks out
The little online encyclopaedia that could
In a speech to the
Covering the event for the
how Hill, a PhD candidate at MIT, interviewed project founders and trawled archival data in an attempt to form hypotheses which would explain why this one project succeeded in attaining critical mass while the others failed. This methodology of using "failure cases" to understand the rise of successful collective action projects is a larger concern of the researcher; a subsequent project will test the hypotheses using quantitative database analysis.While all examples he looked at shared a similar collaborative ethos, the critical factor Hill identified in Wikipedia's relative success was that it alone attracted masses of contributors. He attributed this in part to Wikipedia's self-characterisation as an encyclopaedia, which provided a model of a resource that was easily understandable by potential contributors, many of whom were highly literate
A second counterintuitive reason for Wikipedia's success advanced by Hill was its lack of technological sophistication and ambition; every other encyclopaedia built its own technology but neglected to seed its contributor base, expecting volunteers to
Garber concludes:
There’s some good food for thought for news organizations in those findings. If you want user contributions, build platforms that are familiar and easy. Lower the barriers to participation; focus on helping users to understand what you want from them rather than on dazzling them. Though gamification — with incentives that encourage certain user behaviors, complete with individual rewards (badges! titles! mayors!) — certainly has a role to play in the new news ecosystem, Hill’s findings suggest that the inverse of game dynamics can be a powerful force, as well. His research highlights the value of platforms that invite rather than challenge — and the validity of contributions made for the collective good rather than the individual.
Internet philosopher: Wikipedia a social model beyond market or state
A new book by Yochai Benkler – Internet scholar, Harvard University lecturer, and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society – sets out to demolish the widely held notion that humans are motivated primarily by narrowly construed self-interest.
Reviewing Benkler's The Penguin and the Leviathan (2011) for The Atlantic, Walter Frick frames the question posed by the book as "Can the Internet bring the beginning of the end of selfishness?", noting the author's use of Wikipedia as the canonical example of a thriving culture of human collaboration that performs a complex task beyond the realms of commerce and government.
Benkler originally discussed the motivations of Wikipedians in his 2006 analysis of informational economics in the Internet age
Benkler's counterposes "the Penguin" (standing for voluntary mass collaboration and named for
Benkler offers "design levers" – guidelines for aspirant practitioners of co-operation; but Frick finds little in the way of a macroeconomic plan of action in the Penguin model, concluding that translating these design levers into a formal economic model is both daunting and utterly necessary. Perhaps this echoes the maxim that Wikipedia works only in practice, not in theory.
Costly robo-books in the spotlight
In
A sunnier perspective was provided by economist and inventor
Latest apps capitalise on free Wikipedia
Jimbo on tech, culture and protest
The
In brief
He was first apprenticed to a china dealer at Rotherhithe, but, finding that business too irksome, he left both his master and his home, and went to the Potteries, where he found some employment as a china painter. Finding this too monotonous, he came to London, and commenced a life of great privations and hard efforts to study the fine arts. It is said that at this period of his life he seriously injured his health by trying to live for a year on nothing else but potatoes and water.
– The archaic prose stylings of the Joshua Cristall article, derived from Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravings (1886–89), as quoted by Big Think.
- Zombified Britannica saluted: At 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica (see list), hailing the anachronistically romantic tone of the century-old text.
- Irate rugby fans vandalize their targets: Disgruntled by a decision of referee Wallabies player Quade Cooper's semi-protected entry "to reflect that Cooper was cleared of any wrongdoing by a tribunal".
- International relations student scheme a dramatic success: In an article on the integration of technology and social media into Public Policy Initiative, students created new articles in the subject area on topics until then uncovered by the encyclopaedia. The article conveyed the skepticism towards Wikipedia of the students, who had witnessed the turbulent rise of the site during their university years, and as Davis's modest hopes of the project being a public literature review, before revealing the dramatic success of the scheme, which had significant reader impact (including 5,000+ daily views of the student-authored National Democratic Party (Egypt)article at the height of the Egyptian Revolution) and which Davis said resulted in the greatest research papers she had ever seen at the university.
- Seigenthaler speaks out: Vanderbilt News announced the imminent appearance of malicious editing of his Wikipedia biography in 2005, at Vanderbilt University. The journalist and publisher, described as "a nationally recognized advocate for the First Amendment also known for his criticism of Internet vandals who post false information on user-created sites like Wikipedia", is to give a speech entitled “Wikipedia, WikiLeaks and Wiccans: Historical Accuracy Online” in the university's Central Library on October 21st.
Discuss this story
Sitewide watchlist is what makes Wikipedia work
For those of us who have done web work almost as long as visual browsers have been around, the reason Wikipedia has exploded is that a single page, the watchlist, keeps one instantly up to date on a horde of pages and images one has worked on. One can come back weeks, months, or even years later, and start right back up working on one's interests. Concerning overseeing the creation of concise, in-depth, continually-evolving articles on any topic nothing beats the watchlist. Blogs suck in comparison since they just pile up info without making it concise. Website software (offline or online) is a pain to use in comparison to wiki editing. As concerns the quality of info Wikia sucks in comparison to Wikipedia. Wikia does not have a sitewide watchlist. Every tiny or big wiki has a separate watchlist. MediaWiki developers need to create integrated watchlists for wiki farms. Then indepth info illustrated with images and videos will spread and explode beyond Wikipedia. Semiprofit
Google makes Wikipedia work
What makes Wikipedia work is Google's de facto marketing subsidy of it in terms of search ranking promotion. But nobody (in academia) seems to want to think about that :-( . -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 22:33, 18 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]