The Genealogy of Knowledge: Introducing a tool and method for tracing the social construction of knowledge on Wikipedia

The study of the social construction of knowledge is an important topic in information systems. While the emergence of online social media platforms has brought about multiple new ways of knowledge co-creation by large groups of users, such processes are not yet well understood. We investigate how processes of knowledge co-creation can be studied in online platforms. We utilize data from Wikipedia to explore how knowledge is created and evolves over time. We draw on the theory of social representations (SRT), which views knowledge as a product of collective work carried out by social groups to make sense of their environments. We develop a method for studying social representations on Wikipedia that builds on WikiGen - an analytical tool - and qualitative analysis. Its usefulness is demonstrated with two illustrative case studies, the Cloud Computing and iPad Wikipedia articles. We contribute to IS a new tool and method for studying online knowledge co-creation processes

Wikipedia, Translation and the Collaborative Production of Spatial Knowledge(s): A socio-narrative analysis

This article explores the significance and complexity of the role translation plays in the production of knowledge within the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. It positions this investigation within a growing body of research into the user-generated site as a prominent new arena for the social construction of reality, before critiquing the ways translation has so far been conceptualized in this context. It focuses on the English-language Wikipedia "Paris" page, using a socio-narrative approach. This analysis reveals translation to be inextricably bound up in the processes of knowledge production, dissemination, and negotiation through which content is collaboratively created within the world's most popular reference work

21st-century scholarship and Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the world’s fifth most-used Web site, is a good illustration of the growing credibility of online resources. In his article in Ariadne earlier this year, “Wikipedia: Reflections on Use and Academic Acceptance”, Brian Whalley described the debates around accuracy and review, in the context of geology. He concluded that ‘If Wikipedia is the first port of call, as it already seems to be, for information requirement traffic, then there is a commitment to build on Open Educational Resources (OERs) of various kinds and improve their quality.’ In a similar approach to the Geological Society event that Whalley describes, Sarah Fahmy of JISC worked with Wikimedia and the British Library on a World War One (WWI) Editathon. There is a rich discourse about the way that academics relate to Wikipedia

Regional Languages on Wikipedia. Venetian Wikipedia’s user interaction over time

Given that little is known about regional language user interaction practices on Wikipedia, this study analyzed content creation process, user social interaction and exchanged content over the course of the existence of Venetian Wikipedia. Content of and user interactions over time on Venetian Wikipedia exhibit practices shared within larger Wikipedia communities and display behaviors that are pertinent to this specific community. Shared practices with\ud other Wikipedias (eg. English Wikipedia) included coordination content as a dominant category of exchanged content, user-role based structure where and most active communicators are administrators was another shared feature, as well as socialization tactics to involve users in online projects. While Venetian Wikipedia stood out for its geographically-linked users who emphasized their regional identity. User exchanges over time spilled over from online to offline domains. This analysis provides a different side of Wikipedia collaboration which is based on creation, maintenance, and negotiation of the content but also shows\ud engagement into interpersonal communication. Thus, this study exemplifies how regional language Wikipedias provide ways to their users not only to preserve their cultural heritage through the language use on regional language Wikipedia space and connect through shared contents of interest, but also, how it could serve as a community maintenance platform that unifies users with shared goals and extends communication to offline realm

TiFi: Taxonomy Induction for Fictional Domains [Extended version]

Taxonomies are important building blocks of structured knowledge bases, and their construction from text sources and Wikipedia has received much attention. In this paper we focus on the construction of taxonomies for fictional domains, using noisy category systems from fan wikis or text extraction as input. Such fictional domains are archetypes of entity universes that are poorly covered by Wikipedia, such as also enterprise-specific knowledge bases or highly specialized verticals. Our fiction-targeted approach, called TiFi, consists of three phases: (i) category cleaning, by identifying candidate categories that truly represent classes in the domain of interest, (ii) edge cleaning, by selecting subcategory relationships that correspond to class subsumption, and (iii) top-level construction, by mapping classes onto a subset of high-level WordNet categories. A comprehensive evaluation shows that TiFi is able to construct taxonomies for a diverse range of fictional domains such as Lord of the Rings, The Simpsons or Greek Mythology with very high precision and that it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for taxonomy induction by a substantial margin

Education Unleashed: Participatory Culture, Education, and Innovation in Second Life

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and LearningWhile virtual worlds share common technologies and audiences with games, they possess many unique characteristics. Particularly when compared to massively multiplayer online role-playing games, virtual worlds create very different learning and teaching opportunities through markets, creation, and connections to the real world, and lack of overt game goals. This chapter aims to expose a wide audience to the breadth and depth of learning occurring within Second Life (SL). From in-world classes in the scripting language to mixed-reality conferences about the future of broadcasting, a tremendous variety of both amateurs and experts are leveraging SL as a platform for education. In one sense, this isn't new since every technology is co-opted by communities for communication, but SL is different because every aspect of it was designed to encourage this co-opting, this remixing of the virtual and the real

The free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit: the shifting values of Wikipedia editors

Wikipedia is often held up as an example of the potential of the internet to foster open, free and non-commercial collaboration. However such discourses often conflate these values without recognising how they play out in reality in a peer-production community. As Wikipedia is evolving, it is an ideal time to examine these discourses and the tensions that exist between its initial ideals and the reality of commercial activity in the encyclopaedia. Through an analysis of three failed proposals to ban paid advocacy editing in the English language Wikipedia, this paper highlights the shift in values from the early editorial community that forked encyclopaedic content over the threat of commercialisation, to one that today values the freedom that allows anyone to edit the encyclopaedia

A qualitative enquiry into OpenStreetMap making

Based on a case study on the OpenStreetMap community, this paper provides a contextual and embodied understanding of the user-led, user-participatory and user-generated produsage phenomenon. It employs Grounded Theory, Social Worlds Theory, and qualitative methods to illuminate and explores the produsage processes of OpenStreetMap making, and how knowledge artefacts such as maps can be collectively and collaboratively produced by a community of people, who are situated in different places around the world but engaged with the same repertoire of mapping practices. The empirical data illustrate that OpenStreetMap itself acts as a boundary object that enables actors from different social worlds to co-produce the Map through interacting with each other and negotiating the meanings of mapping, the mapping data and the Map itself. The discourses also show that unlike traditional maps that black-box cartographic knowledge and offer a single dominant perspective of cities or places, OpenStreetMap is an embodied epistemic object that embraces different world views. The paper also explores how contributors build their identities as an OpenStreetMaper alongside some other identities they have. Understanding the identity-building process helps to understand mapping as an embodied activity with emotional, cognitive and social repertoires