Critical point of view: a Wikipedia reader

For millions of internet users around the globe, the search for new knowledge begins with Wikipedia. The encyclopedia’s rapid rise, novel organization, and freely offered content have been marveled at and denounced by a host of commentators. Critical Point of View moves beyond unflagging praise, well-worn facts, and questions about its reliability and accuracy, to unveil the complex, messy, and controversial realities of a distributed knowledge platform. The essays, interviews and artworks brought together in this reader form part of the overarching Critical Point of View research initiative, which began with a conference in Bangalore (January 2010), followed by events in Amsterdam (March 2010) and Leipzig (September 2010). With an emphasis on theoretical reflection, cultural difference and indeed, critique, contributions to this collection ask: What values are embedded in Wikipedia’s software? On what basis are Wikipedia’s claims to neutrality made? How can Wikipedia give voice to those outside the Western tradition of Enlightenment, or even its own administrative hierarchies? Critical Point of View collects original insights on the next generation of wiki-related research, from radical artistic interventions and the significant role of bots to hidden trajectories of encyclopedic knowledge and the politics of agency and exclusion

What We Know About Wikipedia: A Review of the Literature Analyzing the Project(s).

This article proposes a review of the literature analyzing Wikipedia as a collective system for producing knowledge. JEL Classification: L39, L86, H41, D7

Wikipedia @ 20

Wikipedia’s first twenty years: how what began as an experiment in collaboration became the world’s most popular reference work. We have been looking things up in Wikipedia for twenty years. What began almost by accident—a wiki attached to a nascent online encyclopedia—has become the world’s most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of (mostly) reasoned interaction. How has Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remained true to its original mission of “free access to the sum of all human knowledge” when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms? In this book, scholars, activists, and volunteers reflect on Wikipedia’s first twenty years, revealing connections across disciplines and borders, languages and data, the professional and personal. The contributors consider Wikipedia’s history, the richness of the connections that underpin it, and its founding vision. Their essays look at, among other things, the shift from bewilderment to respect in press coverage of Wikipedia; Wikipedia as “the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in history”; and the acknowledgment that “free access” includes not just access to the material but freedom to contribute—that the summation of all human knowledge is biased by who documents it. Contributors Phoebe Ayers, Omer Benjakob, Yochai Benkler, William Beutler, Siko Bouterse, Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze, Amy Carleton, Robert Cummings, LiAnna L. Davis, Siân Evans, Heather Ford, Stephen Harrison, Heather Hart, Benjamin Mako Hill, Dariusz Jemielniak, Brian Keegan, Jackie Koerner, Alexandria Lockett, Jacqueline Mabey, Katherine Maher, Michael Mandiberg, Stephane Coillet-Matillon, Cecelia A. Musselman, Eliza Myrie, Jake Orlowitz, Ian A. Ramjohn, Joseph Reagle, Anasuya Sengupta, Aaron Shaw, Melissa Tamani, Jina Valentine, Matthew Vetter, Adele Vrana, Denny Vrandeči

The rise of the citizen curator : participation as curation on the web

From jazz clubs to cheese plates, the term curation has become a signifier of the growing need to organise and prioritise the seemingly endless possibilities of the digital sphere. The issue addressed here is in the associated meanings of the word curation and what it means to be a curator by examining the experience of the curatorial within a discrete context: the Irish curatorial landscape. The word curation comes from the Latin curare, to care for, and has long been associated with the professional duties of those selected as custodians for objects and knowledge deemed to be important to communities, nations, countries or even the world. However, as objects move from being purely physical to the digital, and knowledge changes from being transmitted through similarly physical media to digital formats that can be set free on the Web, what it means to curate has also changed. Curators are no longer necessarily identified as employed within museums or galleries; the word is now also applied to those who engage with and aid in the management and presentation of digital assets online. Curators have emerged in the online space much like their forerunners, bloggers or citizen journalists. We are now seeing the rise of citizen curators on the Web, which has not created these individually motivated curators, but has made their curatorial activities visible. Citizen journalists no longer need to have a printing press or publishing house to communicate with their audience; similarly, citizen curators do not need a private cabinet of curiosities or a job in a museum to allow them to curate or exhibit to an audience.The aims of this research are threefold: to examine the current terminology related to curation by those who identify as curators or engage in curation in Ireland; to define what it means to be a curator or a citizen curator within the Irish context; and to investigate the changing nature of exhibition spaces contained in the Irish context in light of the Web and digital spaces. The study will take the form of an autoethnography, exploiting my unique position within the museum and open knowledge community in Ireland to examine current understandings of curation and the phenomenon of the citizen curator. The focus will be on my work within Wikimedia Community Ireland (WCI), a branch of the Wikimedia Foundation which promotes the use of Wikipedia in Ireland in education, culture, and open knowledge. As an autoethnographer, I can act as an intermediary, part way between those working in cultural organisations and the public involved in knowledge building projects. The study will look at how those engaged in curation articulate the work they do by means of interviews and participant observation. These sources will allow for the development of a spectrum of curatorial practice.The spectrum will arise from the participants’ (both citizen curators and those working in Irish cultural institutions) own understanding and definitions of curation and what it means to curate. In placing these definitions of curation within a spectrum that takes in broader understandings of curatorial practice, the newer forms of digital curation, and a picture of how the citizen curator relates to these methods, will emerge. The disruptive effect which the digital, and in particular the concept of the Long Tail, has brought to bear upon understanding of the assembling, storing, and using of collections will be examined. It will answer many of the issues surrounding the discipline-specific definitions of curation and the curator while informing their relationship with each other. By drawing out curation into a spectrum, what unfolds is the movement of curation from a traditional and closed system of learnt practices, to one which is formed around more open and accessible conventions of curation. In identifying the citizen curator, their role in the larger curatorial debate can be acknowledged and better incorporated into the multitude of online curated projects. This hinges on the emergence of the Do It With Others ethos which pervades both online and offline creative communities, and it redefines curation from a solitary practice, to one which is demarcated by its participatory nature

The role of offline ties in online communities : the case of Wikipedia

This thesis investigates the role of offline ties in online communities, taking the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia as an example. It uses publicly available data collected from the German Wikipedia to assess whether offline meeting participation affects editors' behaviour in three different domains: 1) productivity and collaboration, 2) norm-relevant behaviour, and 3) election participation. Data was collected on over 4000 meetings covering the period between the creation of the German Wikipedia in 2001 to March 2020. In the first substantive chapter of this thesis, matching meetup attendees with a comparable control group and employing a difference-in-differences design, I find positive and significant effects of meetup attendance on productivity on Wikipedia, measured as the number of edits. In the second substantive chapter, I build upon the theoretical arguments put forward by Coleman (1990) and test whether offline network density influences norm-relevant behaviour. I find only limited importance of the offline network: those attending meetups tend to both experience and conduct fewer norm violations, and they give and receive generally more rewards. However, the density of the offline network does not play a noteworthy role in explaining online norm violation and norm enforcement, except that those in high-density off- line networks generally give fewer rewards. Lastly, for the third substantive chapter, I collected data on all elections for administrators on the German Wikipedia. Using hybrid multilevel random effects models, I find that offline participation measures influence whether one is successful as a candidate, and whether and how one votes. This highlights important processes in situations of public elections. This study is one of the first to bridge the gap between online and offline behaviour, using digital trace data and offline meeting data on a large scale. The findings emphasise how offline interactions in online communities can affect the community and the important role of social capital. They have implications for online communities and Wikimedia in regard to understanding the importance of meetups and (inequality in) access to meetings

How is encyclopaedia authority established?

I embarked on this research because I wanted to explore the basis of textual authority. Such an understanding is particularly important in a world where there is such an overload of information that it is a challenge for the public to identify which publications to choose when looking for specific information. I decided to look at the case of encyclopaedias because of the widespread belief that encyclopaedias are the ultimate authorities. I also made the choice based on the observation that, besides the research on Wikipedia, the scientific community seems to overlook encyclopaedias, despite of the role these latter play as key sources of information for the general public. Two theories are combined to serve as a framework for the thesis. On the one hand, there is the theory of cognitive authority as defined by Józef Maria Bocheński, Richard De George, and Patrick Wilson. On the other hand, there is the theory of quality as defined from the various frameworks recommended by librarians and information scientists on how to assess the quality of reference works. These two theoretical frameworks are used to deconstruct the concept of authority and to highlight aspects of authority which may be particularly worthy of investigation. In this thesis, studies were conducted on the following: (1) a literature review on the origin and evolution of encyclopaedia authority throughout the history of encyclopaedia, (2) a review of previous research pertaining to the quality and the authority of Wikipedia, (3) an analysis of the publishing and dissemination of science and technology encyclopaedias published in the 21st century throughout worldwide libraries, (4) a survey of perspective of encyclopaedia authors on the role of encyclopaedias in society and on the communication of scientific uncertainties and controversies, and (5) an analysis of book reviews towards a general assessment of encyclopaedia quality. The thesis illustrates how a concept such as authority which is typically taken for granted can actually be more complex and more problematic than it appears, thereby challenging widespread beliefs in society. In particular, the thesis pinpoints potential contradictions regarding the importance of the author and the publishers in ensuring encyclopaedia authority. On a theoretical level, the thesis revisits the concept of cognitive authority and initiates a discussion on the complex interaction between authority and quality. On a more pragmatic level, the thesis contributes towards the creation of guidelines for encyclopaedia development. As an exploratory study, the thesis also identifies a range of areas which should be of priority for future research

Participatory Listmaking: Encyclopedic Lists, Evaluative Lists, Playlists

Lists tend to be treated in media studies as “pre-text”, “con-text”, or “para-text”, but rarely in a focused and tailored manner as “text”. One reason for this, I suggest, is rooted in the list form’s ambiguous constitution as both the multiple individuated items in the list as well as the singular ground onto which they are drawn together, accounting for a paradoxical quality that confers upon the list form both its heady participatory capacities and more limiting “granular” semiotic capacities. Defining a list most generally as “a category, communicated”, this dissertation identifies and explores three such kinds of lists and their sites of listmaking, analyzing each through the co-ordinates of participation, selection, order, and rhetoric. Encyclopedic lists exhibit a style of listmaking whose roots I trace to the great 18th century encyclopedic projects, emphasize a mode of amateur contribution aimed at completing the list in an expanding and proliferate world, and exhibit a paradoxical rhetoric of totalization and fragmentation that, I argue, resolves through an ethic of “completism.” Evaluative lists such as Top 10 or Best-of lists exhibit a style of listmaking I trace to the history of women’s and lifestyle periodicals, and exhibit a rhetorical stance that combines the fragmentation inherent in masses of individual “subjective” experiences with the more authoritative aims of the genres to act as “arbiters of taste”, resolving in an ethic of “tacit commensuration.” Playlists across various music scheduling, personal compilation, and digital contexts exhibit a mode of listmaking focused on the artistic criteria of the playlist-maker, where the form is pulled rhetorically towards its pretentions of reflecting an artistic work in its own right and reflecting a fan-perspective that emphasizes the received identities and social existences of its items, prompting an ethic of “contingency” in an attempt to secure a fleeting authorial coherence. I conclude that we turn to participatory lists when we are committed to exploiting the participatory capacities inherent in encyclopedic completion, evaluative commensuration, and aesthetic contingency, but in an addendum to the theory of “participatory cultures” (Jenkins 2009), we may also recognize the limitations inherent in texts that describe the world by the accretion of “facts”, that never quite sustain a singular argumentative arc, and that paint pictures using the coarse brushes of others’ commercial-aesthetic works