wikinomics talks about history

Here is a link to the Wikinomics website, specifically to an article written by Jeff DeChambeau titled Wikipedia: Living History for the Rest of Time?

http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/02/wikipedia-living-history-for-the-rest-of-time/

Jeff talks about how in the future Wikipedia may be used as a reference for insight into today's societies and cultures and touches on some of the same points that I have made regarding history and Wikipedia; namely that because of the transparency of the articles (through the discussion pages) future historians will be able to track the evolution of debate on a topic.

Wikinomics.com is a really good site and if you are interested in this topic the I would recommend you check it out.

Wikipedia cited in legal document

I was just reading about a Connecticut Justice has been revealed to have cited Wikipedia in an 84 page opinion piece about legalizing same-sex marriages. He used Wikipedia to identify the number of openly gay members of congress and now it is causing a stir. Should Wikipedia be allowed to be used in our legal system? Should Wikipedia be allowed to be used in our education system? The fact that this Justice has the foresight to support same-sex marriages indicates that his/her opinion on the collaboration occurring online in Wikipedia is that it is not as haphazard and unreliable as some would have you believe.

When will people stop gasping at the fact that Wikipedia is commonly used as a source and instead focus their energies into making sure that it stands up to whatever expectations they have of such a system? Through their collaboration the system improves. Nothing is achieved through turning up your nose.

(Link to article: http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/25746)

Watered down Wikipedia: political correctness, history and consensus

In an earlier post I discussed issues around recorded history and I want to elaborate on that a bit because it really is one of the core topics of this blog.
Essentially, I think that the internet, and Web 2.0 in particular, has the potential to allow us the opportunity to lessen the chances of a skewed, biased or manipulated version of historical events being passed on or taught as fact. I was born and raised in South Africa, and I know that some of what I was taught at school in regards to the countries’ history and colonisation had been positioned in my school textbooks to ensure that we never entertained questions about South Africas colonisation and the methods undertaken to achieve it. I am sure this is the same in many Western countries. Colonisation was all about ‘discovery’ and ‘adventure’ and those who embarked in those initial journeys were ‘brave’ and ‘heroes’. And sure, they probably were pretty brave and for them it was all about the adventure and discovery, but at no stage was I taught about that period of history from an indigenous perspective. If I had been, would it have framed my ideas about the political strife of the country in a different way?

I think you can probably see what I am getting at here; that the ability to debate matters of historical relevance in order to come to a consensus on them (even if the consensus is a differentiation of opinion) on a platform which allows all with access to see the debate in its entirety would, a) mean that the accounts of that event were as close to the truth as possible and, b) that general opinions on certain issues stemmed from a place of truthful representation of those events, rather than a biased or false one. The results of this I could dream about for days, but, of course, no system exists at present which could really initiate or mobilise this kind of discourse. Once again, the closest thing we have at present is Wikipedia and although it goes far to lay the groundwork it is also at present very young and somewhat flawed. For example, how many Wikipedia users actually read the discussion pages behind an article. Probably this is dependant on the kind of information sought, but this leads me to my next set of questions: how can users rest assured that they are able to retrieve all the relevant information from Wikipedia when with mass collaboration comes debate and thus compromise as to what is the truth or is relevant and what is not? The risk for the egalitarian model of the Internet as I have laid out is then that “collaborative intelligence leads to bland compromises; collective intelligence to populism and even to tunnel vision.” According to Marijn de Waal, the results “may be democratic but it is not good for society or for the quality of cultural production”.

I wrote an essay on this recently and used this as my example: During the late 20th Century a common place topic to joke about was how political correctness had become so pertinent to society that everything in the end had been watered down so much so as not to offend anyone, to an almost ridiculous point. The classic example of this is the attempts at banning and reediting of Enid Blyton’s Noddy books as a result of the main characters close friendship with Big Ears, which some took to imply a covert homosexual relationship. The subsequent Noddy publications and television shows therefore carefully omit subject matter which could be read as (homo)sexual, namely instances where Big Ears might have stayed the night at Noddy’s house. For a child, sleep over’s are an innocent part of growing up and is important for personal confidence and social bonding, and yet in this context that activity was omitted from the work due to the existence of a possibility that it may be perceived the wrong way.

The ‘Noddy’ page on Wikipedia fails to mention the controversy surrounding Big Ears and only briefly refers to the well-known controversy involving the black-faced Golliwogg characters, which happened in the early 1960s. Through attempts to be neutral the article fails to properly address an instance of social importance (an open discussion of media represented racism during the civil rights movement), instead stating that the inclusion of the Golliwoggs dolls were omitted due to the characters “fall[ing] out of favour” – falling out of favour with whom is not addressed.

Wikipedia’s ‘Noddy’ page concerns itself with description and reserves the ideological discussions for the ‘discussions’ page. The success of Wikipedia in embodying Charles Leadbetters We-Think model relies heavily on the inclusion of a discussion board for each topic and the transparency of the platform itself, as mentioned in an earlier post. Although a seemingly irrelevant example in the context of historical events and accuracy of representation, it illustrates the point that de Waal makes above and highlights the infancy in the development of such an online system.

Although obviously flawed, Wikipedia offers us a preview of what should be expected from Web 2.0 and the future of the Internet. It offers us a taste of what is possible when (almost) everyone is forwarded the opportunity to input their knowledge into a system which records all human knowledge; in effect participating in a massive discussion about the truth of our collective histories, while at the same time debating with and educating each other. Through these platforms is the potential for history to be no longer written only by the winners.

Professor Wikipedia

I just watched this skit done by the College Humor crew which highlights and jokes about some of the problems with Wikipedia. A bit stagey but still funny and on some points quite apt.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1830262

Did you watch it? What do you think about some of the points it raised?

Wikipedia is interesting

This is a great way to spend twenty minutes. It really shows how Wikipedia can surpass a traditional encyclopaedia in regards to quantity of content because in Wikipedia the 'list of historical elephants' is just as relevant as, say, the history of rock n roll.

'36 Reasons why Wikipedia is the Greatest Invention in Human History'

http://www.enotes.com/blogs/wikipedia/2008-09/36-reasons-wikipedia-is-the-greatest-invention-in-human-history/#comment-2123

Collective Journalism

I haven't done much researching into this, but I was just reading this article about a guy who was writing about Wikipedia for an article in Esquire magazine and put a draft of the article (with intentional typos and falsities) on Wikipedia. Within 24 hours the typos had been fixed and the article had been edited into a cohesive and publishable article.

This got me thinking about collective journalism and whether such a thing could exist. Of course, a newspaper is an example of collective journalism but what I mean more a collective collaboration on one article in particular. If you were the authority on something, say you were at an event, you could collaborate with others to write an article about that event. So basically the Wikipedia structure, applied to the news media.

Does anything like this exist?

(link to article: http://news.cnet.com/Esquire-wikis-article-on-Wikipedia/2100-1038_3-5885171.html?tag=mncol;txt)

Update: after about ten seconds searching I found: www.collectivejouralism.org but it seems like a really underdeveloped and generally pretty bad site.
Anyone know of any genuine collective journalism sites? Or does Wikipedia already fulfill that role?

New Media Audiences

The contemporary media environment has shifted dramatically in regards to the production, dissemination and reception of information. In terms of ‘audience’ media consumption, that shift has precipitated a move towards a complex mediascape where individuals now have a huge amount of influence over what media they engage with and when, or how often – in effect rendering them no longer ‘audiences’ but what Axel Bruns calls “prod-users”. Lievrouw and Livingstone address this shift from the perspective of traditional media modes of operation towards one where its focus is on ‘mediation’ – I will look at this in more detail in a future post.

With the arrival of new media technology, specifically the internet and the development of Web 2.0, people are now enabled and encouraged to seek out and furthermore question information in a much less traditional manner than before. This is through offering forums and spaces where public discussions and debates not only take place, but are also recorded in their entirety and displayed for anyone who is interested to see. This transparency is a vital key to the longevity of a system whose goals are to host and publish open discourses on just about every topic as it exemplifies the level of inclusion that applies to all users, not just the creators.

Charles Leadbetter identifies a growing social desire for explicit control over our own media diets. He summarises this social development:
In the we-think economy people don’t just want services and goods delivered to them. They also want tools so that they can take part in places in which to play share, debate with others.
Web 2.0 offers Internet users the facilities through which they are able to participate in a variety of online communities. Different platforms available through the Web 2.0 services vary according to user behaviour and expectations of that platform. For example, blogs are designed around contribution, of both the blog owner and its readership; social networks are designed to do exactly that: to network people, to connect them. Leadbetter states that “for sustained creative collaboration to take off” another tool is needed: at present that tool is the wiki. The power of the wiki lies in the power of the collective. What wiki’s allow, is for people to co-operate with the goal of “summaris[ing] a debate or amass[ing] a body of information and creat[ing] documents with a collective author.” This change in approach has seen massive growth with the arrival of Web 2.0 platforms; blogs, networking sites and, of course, Wikipedia. With Wikipedia, users are automatically placed in a position of authority, asserting this new produser approach for its users and enabling them to participate fully in the activities taking place within it.

The tone of the media is shifting (or has shifted, really) – people don’t like being told anymore, they want to find and then decide for themselves. They want to participate and engage and make sure that they are not being duped as a result of hidden interests. With this shift comes a changing face for ‘audiences’, one where they are respected for their individuality and knowledge and not talked at in ways which are designed to relieve them of their time and money.

Let's talk about Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an open-source free encyclopaedia, which relies on the participation (in the practical form of writing and editing information) of its users to keep it up-to-date and relevant. Although it is easy to identify the flaws of such an online service (some of which I will discuss in detail in future posts), I think it is also pertinent to assess the value of Web 2.0 services like Wikipedia in relation to the potential of achieving a truthful global record of historical and social events. However, in order to address this topic it is pertinent to discuss several of the issues and theories surrounding a service such as Wikipedia.

The predominant questions that arises when addressing issues centred around Web 2.0, and Wikipedia in particular, focus on access, equality and education as well as the notion of collective intelligence. Services such as Wikipedia rely on user interaction and participation to fill its database. Users are encouraged to write about what they know, and edit previous articles in a bid to build a database of information: “the sum of all human knowledge”. Not surprisingly, one issue for the general populous accepting this kind of ‘information evolution’ is authority – who has the authority on that information and where did they get the authority (or authoritative information) from? After all, as Martijn de Waal points out, “[e]very link from a blog to an article in a newspaper raises that paper’s ‘page ranking’ in Google and thus its visibility and potential authority”. This unintentional voting system works against the valid “systems of collaborative intelligence” which predisposes that all users will “work together on the basis of equality to create meaning and compile knowledge”.

According to Stephen Lax (2007), user-inequality is a key flaw for the egalitarian ideals of the internet and Web 2.0 as expressed by Charles Leadbetter (We-Think) and de Waal. Aside from access issues, dubbed ‘the digital divide’ (as in not everyone has access to the internet, and the system privileges those who do and rewards them for it), Lax maintains that new information and communications technologies (ICTs) are not the answer to bring about a more equal society. Instead, the Internet merely reflects the general material inequalities which currently separate the rich from the poor, the fed from the starving and the privileged from the underprivileged.

However, Pierre Levy (2001) disagrees with Lax when he argues that, likewise with the television then the film industry, that the potential for the internet to exclude some and include others is not as big a problem as other deem it to be. Not everyone has access to a telephone and corporations make massive profits off the communications industry (and regulate it) but that certainly does not make the case against them, is Levy’s argument. He goes further to point out that it is “not the poor who are “against the Internet, but those whose power, privilege (especially cultural), and monopoly are threatened by the emergence of new configurations of the communications infrastructure”. Here Levy is hinting at the power structures which are in place and prove more of a threat to equality than the existence of new communications technologies.

Critics and sceptics of Wikipedia also cite vandalism as a concerning factor as to the reliability of the information on the website – how can users tell that the information they seek has not been written by a vandal trying to misinform? Users assume, and granted are sometimes right, that people will abuse the system through vandalism. However, this I liken to a school goer defacing an encyclopaedia in the library. At first it is gratifying and fun to write vile words and draw crude pictures on the pages but eventually it becomes boring because the environment they are in (the library) always maintains the same purpose and the librarians diligently erases all the vandalism as it occurs. It becomes tiresome to continually vandalise something where other people have a vested interest in returning it to its original (or improved) state. With Wikipedia, the hope then is that eventually the vandals will become bored and move on to another forum for (or form of) expression. Charles Leadbetter, the father of We-Think theory, has faith in this eventually happening, in believing that, given time, “a collective consensus will emerge”.

Beyond vandalism, access and equality, huge concerns still exist around the quality of the information (see Lax: 2007) as a result of the contributions not being written by those in authoritative positions (a graduated historian writing about history, for example). Martijn de Waal discussed these concerns through looking at the current shift from the expert paradigm (“in which experts accredited by official bodies determine what is true and what is not”) towards a more meritocratic system (where what counts is proven expertise rather than institutional embeddedness”). De Waal claims that “the position of traditional experts is being undermined by ‘collaborative intelligence’ systems such as Wikipedia in which media users cooperate in an egalitarian manner”. Through the demise of the expert paradigm, according to de Waal, we can expect to see “a new balance” gradually emerging; in other words, “new collective forms of canonisation” . Furthermore, Leadbetter states that “as people become dependant on the expert knowledge of professionals they loose faith in their own capacity to act”, highlighting the importance of ongoing social engagement in relevant discussions through platforms such as Wikipedia.

This is a complex topic and through this blog I hope to explore it as fully as I can. One important aspect of my discussion here is reader participation, so, if you have any thoughts on the topics covered here I would like to hear it: you have a voice, use it!