The English version of Wikipedia has over 3,400,000 articles at this time, so when I was contemplating a subject that I wanted to contribute on the web-encyclopedia, you could imaging it was hard to come up with something that...
By Bob Nefkens
on 10/02/10 Comments Off on The Collective Collaboration of SpaceCollective
I’m writing this post to say that, since I posted my wikipedia article about Lost character John Locke, I haven’t heard a single thing from bots or other people. I tried to find something that was in my field...
By Sander Jansma
on 10/02/10 Comments Off on Lost in Wikipedia
Ever since Wikipedia has been embraced by millions, the online and collaboratively created encyclopedia has been heralded as the manifestation of Web 2.0’s possibilities. Often, Wikipedia has been ascribed characteristics that belong to online media that are approachable to...
By Lennard Torbijn
on 10/02/10 Comments Off on Contributing to Wikipedia: a painstaking task on an too open platform
Numerous academic books and articles that have claimed to address the workings of new media tend to merely present an online phenomenon’s lineage or draw an analogy between older (media) theory and newer media (theory). Let us, for instance,...
In order to gain some more insight in the inner workings of Wikipedia, I've created a new entry about the book Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women by Ricky Jay. A highly recommended history book about some of the...
By Laurent Hubeek
on 09/30/10 Comments Off on Introducing: A Wiki Debut
Swedish singers are often disregarded. They won’t make it out side the Swedish borders. What happened there? Did publicity fall short? Didn’t MTV pick it up? Or is there some other reason why Swedish musicians mostly don’t appear on...
It’s official: Wikipedia has jumped on the social media bandwagon. The online encyclopedia recently announced the introduction of an article feedback tool currently being tested on 400 articles pertaining to the WikiProject on United States Public Policy. (Melanson, 23...
How have a bunch of nobodies created the world’s largest encyclopedia? In his book, The Wikipedia revolution (2009), Andrew Lih set himself the goal to answer this question. And he has done so quite successfully. He exstensively maps the...
By Lennard Torbijn
on 09/20/10 Comments Off on Book review: Andrew Lih – The Wikipedia revolution
Posting a new entry on Wikipedia is not very difficult, but keeping it online is an impossible mission. These were the first lines of this post when I started writing it a couple of weeks ago. By now I...
Jean-François Lyotard, a French philosopher and postmodern theorist, talks about “meta-narratives” and “local-narratives”. According to him, a meta-narrative is an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge. Briefly, in concept of...
Early in 2007, something strange happened: Wikipedia's growth line flattened. People suddenly became reluctant to create new articles or fix errors or add their kernels of wisdom to existing pages...
By Sisi Yu
on 09/28/09 Comments Off on Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success?
Last week all of the Master students where assigned to start a ‘new’ Wikipedia article, which we all did but with which most of us had a lot of troubles. Most articles where deleted within minutes after creation, others...
Foucault argued that political power and coercion is not only exercised by our government but also by institutions which we don’t immediately see as political, like our education or our healthcare. I would like to add Wikipedia to that...
By Jelle Kamsma
on 09/24/09 Comments Off on Sexuality and Wikipedia
A lof of comments on the reliability of Wikipedia are getting old. These questions do not really concern Wikipedia, but the question: What is a usable source of information? Wikipedia is off course a unique example, but is it any...
Few years ago, Dutch snowboarders tried to create an entry in Wikipedia for BigAirBAG, a Dutch brand of air cushion that can be used to absorb the impact while landing freestyle snowboarding, skiing, mountain biking, BMX, etc. tricks. The entry was deleted after an editor noted that the company is...
Before this assignment I knew nothing about posting to Wikipedia, I’ve only been a reader. I just found out that it is actually quite difficult to simply add an entry to this online encyclopedia. In the past I once...
By Rakesh Kanhai
on 09/23/09 Comments Off on Wikipedia material ?
Wikipedia is quickly emerging as a research object. Considering the incredible amount of (meta)data Wikipedia contains there are legions of possible ways to do useful Wikipedia research. Today, I would like to talk about the possibilities and benefits of...
By Joery Bruijntjes
on 09/23/09 Comments Off on Researching Wikipedia: Activity Streams & Document Network Location
A conflict usually has two or more oppositional factions. They all have their own reason for this conflict, they all have a different point of view on this conflict, and most important; they do not agree with each other...
By Harro Heijboer
on 09/22/09 Comments Off on Wiki’s Political Point of View?
This week assignment for New Media Practices was writing an Wikipedia entry. Although this clarified a lot about Wikipedia and its policies, the job caused me a lot of frustration. I wrote an entry about the Brazilian NGO I...
By ellen sluis
on 09/22/09 Comments Off on ‘Useless Content’ – Part 2
‘Wikipedia is not a valid source’. That’s a common critique on the online encyclopedia. Erin Harty from the University of Idaho stresses that the information on Wikipedia doesn’t have any academic background and that it ‘is not really an...
By ellen sluis
on 09/22/09 Comments Off on ‘Useless Content’ – Part 1
The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is an interesting product of the Web 2.0. Wikipedia asks its users to actively participate, add and change the content of the website, in order to create a knowledge database which is more up to...
Even though the site Wikipedia itself is the most known project of the Wikimedia foundation, there are several sister projects that are interesting and worth of researching. There is, for example, the Wiktionary, which is, quite obviously, a dictionary,...
By Desiree de Jong
on 09/22/09 Comments Off on The Bold Sisters of Wikipedia