Wikipedia Conflict Representation in Articles of War: A critical discourse analysis of current, on-going, socio-political Wikipedia articles about war

With the help of a discourse-historical approach, a textual corpus composed of the talk pages of three controversial, socio-political Wikipedia articles about ongoing wars was analyzed in order to shed light on the way in which conflict is represented through the editing and discussion process. Additionally, a rational discourse was employed in order to unravel communication distortions within the editing process in an attempt to improve communication and consensus-seeking. Finally, semi-structured interviews of participating contributors within studied articles were used in order to better understand Wikipedian experience in a controversial collaboration scenario. Results unveiled a set of discursive practices in which Wikipedians participate, as well as the creation of a Wikipedian argumentation topoi framework useful for further Wikipedia-specific discourse analysis involving the content change-retain negotiation process

« Citez vos sources » : archéologie d’une règle au cœur du savoir wikipédien (2002-2008)

International audienceThe encyclopedia Wikipedia is an innovative project based on the relationship between a socio-technical system and a community of editors. Throughout its history, the community has developed policies to evaluate and validate the knowledge which is collectively produced. This article aims to describe the evolution of policies about citations in Wikipedia in French and the debates these policies have generated between 2002 and 2008. Our anthropological approach highlights the role attributed to referencing to respond to Wikipedia’s lack of epistemic trust.L’encyclopédie Wikipédia résulte d’un projet novateur reposant sur l’articulation entre un dispositif socio-technique et une communauté de rédacteurs. Au fil de son histoire, cette communauté a élaboré des règles destinées à évaluer et valider les savoirs produits collectivement. Cet article a pour objectif de décrire les évolutions des règles relatives au référencement au sein de la Wikipédia en langue française et les débats que ces règles ont suscités entre 2002 et 2008. L’approche anthropologique adoptée met en évidence le rôle attribué au référencement pour faire face aux problèmes de confiance épistémique inhérente à ce projet

Beyond the Gender Gap: Understanding Women\u27s Participation in Wikipedia

In 2010, UNU-MERIT researchers surveyed editors of Wikipedia, “the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit” (Glott, Ghosh, & Schmidt, 2010). When the report revealed that almost 90% of the editors were male, however, it suggested that perhaps not everyone “can edit” Wikipedia—especially women. As the resulting media and academic explanations of the Wikipedia “gender gap” have largely attributed the gap to ‘female lack’—lack of initiative, confidence, or technical skills—very little research has explored the treatment of women within Wikipedia culture. Thus, this paper first draws upon feminist technology scholars to problematize current explanations of the gender gap that frame it as a ‘woman problem’. Then, through in-depth interviews with 26 English Wikipedia women editors, it explores sociocultural norms within Wikipedia that influence women’s lived experiences and participation. The findings frame these norms as gendered organizational tensions, describing how women’s experiences of these tensions lead to their perceived outcomes of isolation, emotional exhaustion and distress, and attrition. Despite these effects, many women editors persist due to their deeply rooted sense of purpose in their work on Wikipedia. The findings also draw upon feminist standpoint theory to discuss the tensions in women’s sense-making of the gender gap, specifically its causes, appropriate editor responses, and solutions. While the standpoints of the participants are complex and fluid, two primary approaches emerged. These approaches can be conceptualized as two ends of a continuum, as women who espouse an essentialist view of gender and an individualistic approach to addressing the gender gap are on one side, and women who hold to gender constructionism and call for cultural and structural change to address the gap are on the other. Thus, this study suggests that gendered sociocultural factors do bear upon women’s participation within Wikipedia, and their sense-making of these gendered tensions—their causes, outcomes, and solutions—are textured by their own social locations and experiences, demonstrating the complexity of women’s participation within Wikipedia. Due to these findings, put simply, the gender gap is not just a ‘woman problem’

Governance in online communities of artistic cultural production

Thesis (D.B.A.)--Boston UniversityWhile scholars have brought much insight into the governance of online communities engaged in the production of goods with relatively established quality criteria, such as open source software, they paid less attention to the governance of online communities of artistic cultural production. In artistic cultural production, due to its drive for novelty and potential resistance to institutionalized norms, it is difficult to create agreements and shared routines among participants -particularly during initial emergence when participants are new to one another and new to their form of contributions. In this two-essay dissertation, I study arguably the largest online community of artistic production in Turkey, Sour Dictionary, and analyze the governance configurations during its initial emergence and ongoing growth. The first essay describes how coherence was achieved during the birth and early years of the Dictionary through the use of ambiguity in the two governance dimensions of vision and rules of production. I show that in this period, ambiguity was maintained in these dimensions not only to provide participants with the flexibility they needed for artistic expressions, but also to bring clarity to the recognition of participants' allegiances. The presence of a shared opposition among participants appears key to achieving coherence in an artistic community, and for such a community, ambiguity is an adaptive resource rather than something to eliminate as is often argued within an economic logic. The second essay follows a natural experiment where the founder's changing decisions on two other governance dimensions of quality assurance and member recruitment, along with his utilizations of IT for growth, resulted in different outcomes of coherence and popularity during the community's ongoing growth. As the founder switched the combination of his use of IT and member recruitment method from one that invited slow and incremental growth to one that brought sudden and massive growth, the community faced a variety of problems in both outcomes. I show that these problems arose as the founder responded to growth by implementing quality assurance methods that emphasized efficiency rather than flexibility, and thus failed to

Ms. Categorized: Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia

Gender is one of the most pervasive and insidious forms of inequality. For example, English-language Wikipedia contains more than 1.5 million biographies about notable writers, inventors, and academics, but less than 19% of these biographies are about women. To try and improve these statistics, activists host “edit-a-thons” to increase the visibility of notable women. While this strategy helps create several biographies previously inexistent, it fails to address a more inconspicuous form of gender exclusion. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and quantitative analysis of web-scraped metadata, this article demonstrates that biographies about women who meet Wikipedia’s criteria for inclusion are more frequently considered non-notable and nominated for deletion compared to men’s biographies. This disproportionate rate is another dimension of gender inequality previously unexplored by social scientists and provides broader insights into how women’s achievements are (under)valued

Authors and Creative Users : Addressing the Conceptual Challenges of Digital Creativity to EU Copyright Law from the Perspective of the Author

To be an “author” might mean many different things, depending on the context in which the word is used. This thesis explores the EU copyright’s concept of author and how it relates to the everyday digital creativity on the Internet. It invites to consider what EU copyright law might look like if the digital creators which this thesis calls Creative Users were included in the legal system as “authors”. For this purpose, the thesis analyses the concept of author in EU copyright law through its history and theory and several conceptualisations that can be seen to characterise what “author” is in the European copyright tradition are identified. These conceptualisations are then used to deepen the understanding of the current EU copyright law and to reflect on two examples of Creative User activities: the collective knowledge production of Wikipedia and the transformative cultural communication of Internet memes. This thesis proposes that to integrate potential new forms of authorship, a compromise could be found between the different ways of conceptualising the author. It is suggested that if the author that is presently guaranteed a high level of protection under EU copyright law were to be treated as a flexible and more inclusive concept and allowed to evolve together with cultural and technological change, it should influence how copyright protection and exploitation are approached as well

Collaborative annotation on the Web

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-72).More and more, web users are moving from simply consuming content on the web to creating it as well, in the form of discussion boards, weblogs, wikis, and other collaborative and conversational media. Despite this, the web remains largely read-only; web designers create sites that are designed to be consumed by the public, much like other, traditional mass media. In this thesis, I explore free, shared annotation as a means of making the web more writable. In doing so, I hope to empower readers to engage more deeply with web content by actively participating in its production, and to have a voice on equal footing with those of the media producers whose content they consume. This thesis details the design and evaluation of Webbed Footnotes, a system for publicly annotating web documents. Though it is not the first such system, its design is novel in that it is sensitive to the needs of both the would-be annotators and the owners of the websites being annotated. In particular, annotators would like their additions to be highly visible, yet website owners demand that their sites be presented in the manner they intended. Webbed Footnotes attempts to fulfill both of these conditions by making annotations highly visible, yet ensuring that the underlying documents remain legible.(cont.) If Webbed Footnotes can partially solve the tension between annotators and authors, then public, shared annotation on the web may have a chance for widespread success, leading to savvier and more engaged readers.by Scott Andrew Golder.S.M

Design of a social medium for Polish and Jewish communities

Thesis (S.M. in Visual Studies)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, September 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 163-165)."The history of the Polish-Jewish relationship is...the embattled terrain of several collective memories, each with its claim to moral legitimacy, and each charged with fierce and sometimes vehement feelings." These contested histories are the source of tension and animosity between Poles and Jews to this day. Unlike the German-Jewish relationship, where "the moral rights and wrongs were starkly clear," Poland's past is far more complex. This thesis describes the design of a storage and retransmission medium for these contested histories, using photography, nomadic performance, new media mapping techniques and imaginary architecture. The system, entitled B'Seder, makes use of the ancient technology of memory palaces to produce a long-term relational aesthetic practice for the transformation of post-conflict societies through storytelling, conversation, and the mapping of narratives into visual forms. Using a well established process from post-traumatic therapy, the medium focuses on restructuring fragmented memories into a cohesive, flowing story. In formal terms, the project begins with a photograph of an empty room. Anecdotes are collected from readings, films and conversations with community participants. These anecdotes are then transformed into mnemonic objects, which are depicted in the image. This process of accumulation of object/stories continues as the image is taken to new sites with new participants. The system then transitions into an editing and organizing mode where these anecdotes are arranged into a singular narrative sequence, which is memorized and recounted in public space.by Ian Wojtowicz.S.M.in Visual Studie

The classification of gene products in the molecular biology domain: Realism, objectivity, and the limitations of the Gene Ontology

Background: Controlled vocabularies in the molecular biology domain exist to facilitate data integration across database resources. One such tool is the Gene Ontology (GO), a classification designed to act as a universal index for gene products from any species. The Gene Ontology is used extensively in annotating gene products and analysing gene expression data, yet very little research exists from a library and information science perspective exploring the design principles, philosophy and social role of ontologies in biology. Aim: To explore how molecular biologists, in creating the Gene Ontology, devised guidelines and rules for determining which scientific concepts are included in the ontology, and the criteria for how these concepts are represented. Methods: A domain analysis approach was used to devise a mixed methodology to study the design of the Gene Ontology. Concept analysis of a GO term and a critical discourse analysis of GO developer mailing list texts were used to test whether ontological realism is a tenable basis for constructing objective ontologies. A comparison of the current GO vocabulary construction guidelines and a study of the reasons why GO terms are removed from the ontology further explored the justifications for the design of the Gene Ontology. Finally, a content analysis of published GO papers examined how authors use and cite GO data and terminology. Results: Gene Ontology terms can be presented according to different epistemologies for concepts, indicating that ontological realism is not the only way objective ontologies can be designed. Social roles and the exercise of power were found to play an important role in determining ontology content, and poor synonym control, a lack of clear warrant for deciding terminology and arbitrary decisions to delete and invent new terms undermine the objectivity and universal applicability of the Gene Ontology. Authors exhibited poor compliance with GO data citation policies, and in re-wording and misquoting GO terminology, risk exacerbating the semantic problems this controlled vocabulary was designed to solve. Conclusions: The failure of the Gene Ontology to define what is meant by a molecular function, the exercise of power by GO developers in clearing contentious concepts from the ontology, and the strict adherence to ontological realism, which marginalises social and subjective ways of classifying scientific concepts, limits the utility of the ontology as a tool to unify the molecular biology domain. These limitations to the Gene Ontology design could be overcome with the development of lighter, pluralistic, user-controlled ‘open ontologies’ for gene products that can work alongside more traditional, ‘top-down’ developed vocabularies