Excited to go home in a week
Frantically finishing up the school year
Hello all, I am a long time Wikipedia user who finally got around to creating a user name. I have made unregistered edits here and there but never anything substantial. I am a graduate student at Cornell University persuing my Masters Degree in Communication. I am from Commerce Township, Michigan.
Thoughts on Wikipedia
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Its hard to get started. There are so many established norms and rules.
What am I trying to address
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- Communal knowledge is better than individual
- Inclusion of not only facts that are up to date (if there is an active community) but also common opinion that would not be in an encyclopedia
- Drawbacks of Wikipedia
- Vandalism
- Inaccuracy from un
- Bias of editors - stereotypical socioeconomic demographic for wikipedia editors
- Skewed content - groups of people drawn to certain articles provide skewed information
- Falsifying information - portrayal online doesnt have to be truthful, what if a user creates a virtual identity like one creates avatars in Second Life (to explore other personas or idealize themselves)
Relating back to class
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- Turner – very particular set of people with particular set of ideals. Does Wikipedia as a whole have a built in bias?
- The average Wikipedian on English Wikipedia (1) is male, (2) is technically-inclined, (3) is formally educated, (4) speaks English to an extent, (5) is white, (6) is aged 15–49, (7) is from a predominantly Christian country, (8) is from an industrialized nation, (9) is from the Northern Hemisphere, and (10) is more likely to be employed in intellectual pursuits than in practical skills or physical labor
- What if the community realizes its bias and tries to address it?
- Bijker – interpretive flexibility, some people spend more time editing their user page than articles and view Wikipedia as a social tool, this has become very prominent in the past year, social construction?
- Lyman - Is Wikipedia a virtual community or a digital library/database?
- Shirky - Social Software Encodes Political Bargains, political groups and public relations people keep a very close eye on wikipedia, wikipedia has no barriers to membership
This is my prediction for the Natural Progression of a Wikipedia article: Stub->unstructured info->structure -> citations-> picture-> info boxes->featured article
- Perfectly reflected in Tarleton Gillespie
- Purposefully left a few mistakes in original stub content
- Much of information pulled directly from Cornell site
- article title renamed within a minute with proper capitalization
- users restructuring the article with headers and categories
- users doing individual research and adding actual content
- text looks much smaller in a wikipedia article than in a word processor
- Professor (In hopes of preventing deletion and resume padding) was quickly changed to Assistant professor
- users formatted text, italicized book titles
- user added picture
- I pulled a lot of content and structure from lawrence lessig's page
- Does Wikipedia have fair use of picture
- External user removed copyrighted content
- posted a message on my talk page warning me about copyright infringement
- user posted Welcome message on my talk page
- lots of vandalism after i sent an email out to certain groups about the article
- social bias even in the vandalism, i noticed several inside jokes among friends, lots of stuff about cornell, much of the vandalism i was able to trace back to a person
- some additions may have been vandalism such as the hockey comment but there was no way to tell
- found myself feeling stalkerish as i dug through Google search results for more information about you.
- your page is significantly longer than James Maas' and trevor Pinch's. there has to be so much that is not included in wikipedia just because nobody cares to add it
- There is such a large strength in Wikipedia’s ability to compile information from different sources
- i put you in the american skeptics category which places you with names such as susan b anthony, isaac asimov, johnny carson, and carl sagan (there are little things that wikipedia can never correct for such as obscure categories
- i dont think you are from ithaca but on facebook it says you are. I'm gonna put you were born in ithaca and see what happens. (hoping to get it changed) . What if somebody uses the data for another study?
- Dan brewer looked up your article and was going to use the information in it but had to check whether it was true or not.
- one user, the one who posted the welcome on my user page is kind of keeping tabs on my activity as he has done several large administrative edits
- one drawback to inviting people to edit was you couldnt see how people flock to certain articles on their own
- its hard to tell who is participant of Wikipedia and who isnt
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