Tag Archives: Wikipedia

Wikipedia as shared worldview

I’m still reading Here Comes Everybody. On p. 279, Shirky writes: Wikipedia, which looks like a reference work to the average viewer, is in fact a bureaucracy given over mainly to arguing. The articles are the residue of the argument, … Continue reading

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Expertise swell in Wikipedia?

At the 2002 VRD conference, my now-colleague Phil Edwards (at the time we were both still mere doctoral students) presented a paper titled: Characterization of Volunteer Expertise Within the Internet Public Library Reference Service. In that study he found what … Continue reading

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Empathy, 2 year olds, and the free rider problem

I heard this story on NPR recently, and then when I saw this tweet by @hrheingold, I remembered that I’d wanted to look up the article in Nature, which I did: Fehr, E., Bernhard, H., & Rockenbach, B. (2008). Egalitarianism … Continue reading

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What motivates Wikipedians?

So this is what I think about when I’m being insomniac during the holidays… As my dear readers are aware, I’m obsessed with the set of problems and/or questions (probably depending on how you look at it) surrounding the motivation … Continue reading

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Made completely out of goat cheese

Following up my previous post on the Wikipedia Scanner, I give you The Wiki Watcher, from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Apparently chèvre is used as a building material in Gainesville FL. Wikipedia says so, so it must be true.

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100 times the information at 85% the accuracy

Scanner Tracks Who’s Changing What on Wikipedia, from NPR See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign, from Wired Wikipedia Scanner — the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith — offers users a … Continue reading

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Kudos to the UW Libraries

It’s been a long time since I’ve done my librarians-need-to-take-professional-responsibility-for-the-reliability-of-Wikipedia-as-an-information-source rant here, mostly because I felt there was nothing more to say on the matter. However, I need to revisit it on account of this article in the latest D-Lib … Continue reading

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Wikicat

Surfing the biblioblogosphere just now, I came across this post on Panlibus, about Wikicat. In simple terms the Wikicat project is attempting to assemble a bibliographic database [yes another one] of all the bibliographic works cited in Wikimedia pages. I … Continue reading

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Had it taken place in the days of the Machine

A fascinating article by Jaron Lanier about why Wikipedia is an instantiation of a more insidious trend, the attempt to create an internet-based hive mind, of sorts: DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism …the trend has been … Continue reading

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WikiReference

Thanks to Jason for pointing this out (and yes, I’m more than a little behind on reading my regular blogs): Wikipedia has a Reference Desk. Apparently The Wikipedia reference desk works like a library reference desk. Though without the librarians, … Continue reading

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