Tag Archives: encyclopedia

E = Media Combinations2: The survival of the fittest

Chris Hoogeveen | 13 October 2010, 7:54 pm | 3 comments | tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Every old medium was once new. And when something gets old we’ve got to search for a way to give it its old glance back. The printed book was once a new medium. It was revolutionary, groundbreaking. But today the book is just a commodity. It is still used very often, but for how long? Terry Flew wrote in his…

The Wiki-Elite

Erik van Bemmelen | 07 October 2010, 6:42 pm | 2 comments | tags: , , , , ,

Sitting in class, I had just created my account on Wikipedia. Within minutes somebody had altered my biography on my personal user page. Luckily, it was the person sitting next to me in class who had successfully fooled me, but that’s not the point here. Imagine someone else being able to alter your biography on Twitter, or your personal information…

A Canadian Wikipedia Adventure

Ronen Shay | 04 October 2010, 8:33 am | tags: , , , , , , , , ,

When contributing to Wikipedia it is always best to stick to what you know. The concept behind the world’s largest online encyclopedia is that everyone has valuable accumulated knowledge that should be shared, on what is essentially a global knowledge base with a fancy title. Writing about what you are unfamiliar with, or something that requires you to conduct research…

WikiAdmin: No Recent Changes

Marte Lindstrom | 03 October 2010, 7:09 pm | tags: , ,

After being asked to write a Wikipedia article I soon realised that the challenge would not be related to the technical side of things, but rather to coming up with a topic. It was difficult to think of a topic that  is not yet part of the over 3.4 million articles that make up the English version of Wikipedia.…

Rage Against the Machine

Natalie Dixon | 03 October 2010, 5:05 pm | 1 comment | tags: , ,

Can you only make a Wikipedia entry if your subject has been covered in the mainstream press a gazillion times? How do underground, guerilla, new subcultures or artists get exposure on Wiki? Short answer: they don’t. I referenced the Het Parool and the Dutch entry for this graffiti artist is hardly different to mine. Laser been published for Pete’s sake. His book is available in the American Book Centre and yet I can’t keep a Wiki entry on him alive for longer than 5 minutes and 35 seconds.

Layar in the wikipedia – How to improve and secure?

Layla Van Daalen | 03 October 2010, 8:25 am | tags: , , ,

The English Wikipedia remains more than 3,4 million articles, the Dutch Wikipedia on the other hand less than one million, so I thought it should not be difficult to find an interesting subject for a new entry on this free encyclopedia. During the brainstorms, thinking of new-media related and other different kind of subjects, I found out it was…

Book Review: “The World and Wikipedia, How We Are Editing Reality” by Andrew Dalby

Ekaterina Yudin | 23 September 2010, 1:23 am | tags: , , ,

“Take any article on Wikipedia. Who wrote it? Where did it come from? Now take a closer look at those unconvincing, badly written sentences in the middle. Why did someone add them? How long will it be before someone else deletes them? And how many people will have read them before they are removed?” -Andrew Dalby

Who, What, Where, When and…

‘Useless Content’ – Part 2

ellen sluis | 22 September 2009, 12:31 pm | tags: , , ,

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 worked for, but unfortunately some active Dutch Wikipedia users thought my contribution was Useless Content.

‘Useless Content’ – Part 1

ellen sluis | 22 September 2009, 11:56 am | tags: , , , , ,

‘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 encyclopedia but an online magazine written by volunteers who do not need to have any specialized knowledge on anything at all’.

The semantic web versus Wikipedia?

Sjoerd Tuinema | 21 September 2009, 10:44 pm | 1 comment | tags: , , , , , , ,

From the day of birth of the Wikipedia project, the online encyclopedia has been a highly controversial case. The debates range from information accuracy (including the inquiry of the information-knowledge relation once again) to the pyramidic usermodel (often undermined as too free or too open) or elsewhere as a fierce debate on the contributions coming from businesses, or just from…