A for Effort
While searching for a subject to write about on Wikipedia, every word I came up with already existed. So I thought about the example that was given, and decided to write about the history of the Amsterdam Dance Centre....
Lost in Wikipedia
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...
Contributing to Wikipedia: a painstaking task on an too open platform
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...
Introducing: A Wiki Debut
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...
Will Wikipedia end the disregarding of Swedish artist?
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...
Do You ‘Like’ Wikipedia? The Socialization of an Encyclopedia
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...
Book Review: “The World and Wikipedia, How We Are Editing Reality” by Andrew Dalby
“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...
Book review: Andrew Lih – The Wikipedia revolution
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...
A Wiki Noob
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...
Wikipedia = Local-Narrative
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...
The vigilance of the Wikipedians
In the last couple of weeks I got some responses to my post concerning the revisitation of my Wikipedia article about Richard A. Rogers – in which I told that I was stupefied by the speed with which I...
Why Digg.com Just ‘Works’ & Why Its Users Quickly Revolt.
So, I just finished reading the better part of Jonathan Zittrain’s lastest book: The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. In it he deals with the question how generative media on the internet (like Wikipedia) may...
Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success?
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...
My Wikipedia-page revisited…
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...
Sexuality and Wikipedia
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...
Wikipedia = reliable
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...
Wikipedia: A Corporate Hub?
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...
Wiki’s Political Point of View?
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...
‘Useless Content’ – Part 2
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...
‘Useless Content’ – Part 1
‘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...
Wikipedia: a Social Playground
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...
The Bold Sisters of Wikipedia
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,...
Astroturfing on Wikipedia
As Wikipedia is currently the number 7 most visited website in the world according to Alexa, and a major source of information for all layers of society, it makes sense to engage in a critical review of its benefits,...
The semantic web versus Wikipedia?
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...