In utilizing search directories for this post (which, I admittedly didn’t use much before this class), I chose to use three different search engines from my last post so that I could become more familiar with them. Specifically, I used Infomine (a scholarly search engine) along with Mahalo.com and About.com (general research engines). The trouble with search directories is you have to use much more clear search terms when searching within them than using search engines like Google. At first I tried to search Mahalo.com for “Wikipedia controversy,” finding no results. For Mahalo.com, I then switched to searching “Wikipedia.” Plain and simple.
Interestingly, a list of pretty helpful “Fast Facts” popped up immediately on the Search Result’s page. They included:
Launched on January 15, 2001
Has strictly neutral point of view
The English language version has over 2 million articles
Largest encyclopedia in the world
Founders: Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger
Built on MediaWiki Software
Maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikipedia has 23 paid members of staff
The site relies on 150,000 volunteers
There are currently more than 11 million Wikipedia articles
The site has translations in 265 languages
I thought this information was a pretty basic crash course in Wikipedia itself, but also contained some helpful and interesting facts. There was also an interesting youtube.com video (VPRO International: Truth According to Wikipedia) linked to on the page that provided a description of the transition from research in the library to research on Wikipedia. It is long, running at 48 minutes, but pieces of it could be added to our presentation. Additionally from this same page came a section called “Controversy,” which again gave a basic grasp of Wikipedia’s drawbacks:
“The main issues that Wikipedia has had to face are charges of bias and unreliability. The
openly editable format leads some to believe the content on Wikipedia is unreliable, as anyone
can edit the text to read anything they want. Wikipedia solves this problem by locking down
hot button pages, such as George W. Bush, from editing, and by having a team of trusted
editors check edits. They also rely on users to catch and report errors.”
In general, Mahalo’s results page (http://www.mahalo.com/Wikipedia) was really helpful in obtaining basic information about Wikipedia. It could prove to be a very important tool when our group presentation comes around. The site itself is run by an company called EdgeCast, which provides its customers with cost benefits so customers can control their own content delivery network. The only drawback of Mahalo.com is it doesn’t cite exactly where its facts came from or who wrote them. Additionally, while the site is copyrighted 2007-2008, no date is attributed to the information. While it appears current, there is no way to know for sure.
As a result, I continued my search and had a great deal of success with About.com. This search directory actually yielded results when using the search term, “Wikipedia controversy.” From these results, I found one site: http://pcworld.about.com/news/Aug042006id126659.htm containing an article called, “Wikipedia to Strive for Higher Quality Content.” In the article, the author, China Martens, outlines the biggest controversy of Wikipedia: reliability of information. She mentions an article from the year previous from John Seigenthaler, about what he found on his own Wikipedia biography, which included defamatory content. This content, while untrue, remained unaltered for four months. Martens also describe how controls have since been put in place on Wikipedia, including system administrators who are now blocking users who repeatedly vandalize entries. Interestingly, Marten mentions a journal entry from “Nature,” outlining how scientific Wikipedia articles average three errors, compared to four found in “Encyclopaedia Britannica.”
While it contains no exact date, this article appears to be a couple of years old (possibly dating from 2006 based upon its reference to Seigenthaler), but still covers the issues surrounding Wikipedia well. About.com is part of the New York Times Company, which proclaims itself as being “committed to quality news.” The company’s revenues in 2007 were $3.2 billion, and includes ownership of “The New York Times, 18 other newspapers, and more than 50 websites. The article I read seems pretty balanced, presenting arguments for both sides of the story, however it seems to favor Wikipedia being more inaccurate. Therefore, it would be beneficial to find a site that is more “pro-Wikipedia.”
As I mentioned earlier, Martens mentioned another article written by John Seigenthaler. I pursued this article. Again, I used About.com, searching “John Seigenthaler, Wikipedia.” It resulted in his 2005 (outdated, but still interesting) USA Today article: “A false Wikipedia ‘biography.’ ” (http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edit_x.htm). It was really interesting to read an article about someone who has had false information “published” about him on Wikipedia and the results it had on his career. In his article Seigenthaler provides valuable arguments against Wikipedia being a source for universal knowledge and a world encyclopedia. He mentions how Wikipedia editors did nothing more to edit the false information other than correcting the spelling of “early” in the entry. The reliability of the information posted was never tested.
The problem with this article is two-fold. Firstly, the article was published November 29, 2005. Obviously, this is outdated, and it can easily be assumed (at least I would hope) that Wikipedia has added new measures to ensure the accurateness of its entries. This leads to the other problem with this article: it is extremely biased. Seigenthaler gives Wikipedia no leniency whatsoever. He never acknowledges how Wikipedia might be an important tool in providing quick and easy information to mass amounts of people. Therefore, more research should be done on how Wikipedia is beneficial.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
How Wikipedia works
We’ve all done it.
Overhearing an unfamiliar term in conversation, on TV, or reading the newspaper, we sign on to the internet and pull up “Wikipedia” to find out more information on the unknown term. We pull up an entry from Wikipedia’s database and instantly get a crash course on one of 2,706,266 English topics.(1)
But how exactly does this helpful tool work? What makes the world of Wikipedia turn?
Wikipedia is a free-content encyclopedia online, where users are allowed to add and edit entries. Started in 2001, the site has spread to include more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages. (2) As the site describes: “Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia.”(3)
Wikipedia.com is run by a software application called “MediaWiki.”(4) This software is generally used by companies for internal knowledge management and for content management.(5) For Wikipedia specifically, this software application retains a history of all edits and changes made to specific entries. Originally, the site ran on a small wiki engine, “UseModwiki,” but switched over in 2003, under the design of Lee Daniel Crocker.(6)
The name “Wikipedia” derives from the word “wiki,” a collaborative website, and “encyclopedia.” Any user with access to the internet is able to edit or add to any existing entries or start a new entry. As the site proclaims:“Anyone is welcome to add information, cross-references, or citations, as long as they do so within Wikipedia’s editing policies and to an appropriate standard. Substandard or disputed information is subject to removal.”(7) For this reason, users of the site are divided into separate roles. There are the users, called readers, who only use the site to obtain information. Additionally, there are “editors,” who edit existing information on the site’s articles. However, there are also layers of proofreaders and reviewers who verify the validity of information added to the site.(8)
According to Angela Beesley, a member of the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, these roles include: readers, editors, administrators, patrollers, policy makers, subject area experts, content maintainers, software developers, and system operators.(9) Each of these roles are used to ensure “the legitimacy of an article: that the contents is sound, that no copyright is violated, that nothing libelous is said, and other concerns.”(10)
---------
For this first entry, I chose to search using subject directories (Google Scholar and Google Directory) because they gave me more focused search results on my topic. While using them, I also noticed that they weeded out advertisements and irrelevant information, simplifying my own search. By choosing to use a scholarly research tool and a general research tool, it broadened my results and gave me differing viewpoints on the same topic.
I tried several subject directories, but got the best results from Google Scholar and Google Directory. I searched twice in each of these directories, using the search terms “About Wikipedia” and “How Wikipedia Works.”
The best sites I found were:
1. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1149453.1149456
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
My results from this page also lead me to other helpful sites, including:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
contains a citation and PDF for an interview with several Wikipedia employees. The interview was done via email before the International Symposium on Wikis in 2006. The ACM Portal website is published by the Association for Computing Machinery and offers many full-length articles. The information is very current, copyrighted in 2009. However the interview itself was done by Dirk Reihle, the chair of the 2006 symposium. The Symposium was geared towards explaining why and how Wikis work and why they are beneficial. The interview is somewhat outdated, since it was for the 2006 symposium. This interview was useful in explaining the different types of users and editors on the Wikipedia page. It gives a detailed description of the process and exactly who does what. However, the interview is noticeably biased, considering the interviewees are full-heartedly in favor of the information presented on the site, therefore any information presented in contest to the accuracy of Wikipedia is excluded. This site won’t be useful in our second blog posting…
was probably the most obvious source on Wikipedia. And while I tried to ignore it in my searching, it became inevitable to read the information. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia is a good source on itself. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a registered nonprofit charity, supported through donations. The foundation’s mission is to “encourage the growth, development, and distribution of free, multilingual content.” (11) The “About” page was last updated on January 16, 2009 and is very current. Surprisingly, this information seems to be pretty reliable. As our presentation is on Wikipedia itself, this “About” page is going to be very helpful in information we will need later on. Obviously, the site is very “pro-Wikipedia.” However, the site even acknowledges some of the drawbacks of the open editing policy, letting users know that not all the information is factual. Yet, other sites might be more beneficial in covering the controversies presented by the site.
(1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
(2)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
(3)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
(4)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
(5)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki
(6)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki
(7)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
(8)Reihle, Dirk. “How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth, Bauer, and Kizu Naoko.” 2006. 19 Jan. 2008.
(9)Reihle, Dirk. “How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth, Bauer, and Kizu Naoko.” 2006. 19 Jan. 2008.
(10)Reihle, Dirk. “How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth, Bauer, and Kizu Naoko.” 2006. 19 Jan. 2008.
(11)http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home
Overhearing an unfamiliar term in conversation, on TV, or reading the newspaper, we sign on to the internet and pull up “Wikipedia” to find out more information on the unknown term. We pull up an entry from Wikipedia’s database and instantly get a crash course on one of 2,706,266 English topics.(1)
But how exactly does this helpful tool work? What makes the world of Wikipedia turn?
Wikipedia is a free-content encyclopedia online, where users are allowed to add and edit entries. Started in 2001, the site has spread to include more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages. (2) As the site describes: “Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia.”(3)
Wikipedia.com is run by a software application called “MediaWiki.”(4) This software is generally used by companies for internal knowledge management and for content management.(5) For Wikipedia specifically, this software application retains a history of all edits and changes made to specific entries. Originally, the site ran on a small wiki engine, “UseModwiki,” but switched over in 2003, under the design of Lee Daniel Crocker.(6)
The name “Wikipedia” derives from the word “wiki,” a collaborative website, and “encyclopedia.” Any user with access to the internet is able to edit or add to any existing entries or start a new entry. As the site proclaims:“Anyone is welcome to add information, cross-references, or citations, as long as they do so within Wikipedia’s editing policies and to an appropriate standard. Substandard or disputed information is subject to removal.”(7) For this reason, users of the site are divided into separate roles. There are the users, called readers, who only use the site to obtain information. Additionally, there are “editors,” who edit existing information on the site’s articles. However, there are also layers of proofreaders and reviewers who verify the validity of information added to the site.(8)
According to Angela Beesley, a member of the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, these roles include: readers, editors, administrators, patrollers, policy makers, subject area experts, content maintainers, software developers, and system operators.(9) Each of these roles are used to ensure “the legitimacy of an article: that the contents is sound, that no copyright is violated, that nothing libelous is said, and other concerns.”(10)
---------
For this first entry, I chose to search using subject directories (Google Scholar and Google Directory) because they gave me more focused search results on my topic. While using them, I also noticed that they weeded out advertisements and irrelevant information, simplifying my own search. By choosing to use a scholarly research tool and a general research tool, it broadened my results and gave me differing viewpoints on the same topic.
I tried several subject directories, but got the best results from Google Scholar and Google Directory. I searched twice in each of these directories, using the search terms “About Wikipedia” and “How Wikipedia Works.”
The best sites I found were:
1. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1149453.1149456
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
My results from this page also lead me to other helpful sites, including:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
(1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
(2)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
(3)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
(4)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
(5)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki
(6)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki
(7)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
(8)Reihle, Dirk. “How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth, Bauer, and Kizu Naoko.” 2006. 19 Jan. 2008.
(9)Reihle, Dirk. “How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth, Bauer, and Kizu Naoko.” 2006. 19 Jan. 2008.
(10)Reihle, Dirk. “How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth, Bauer, and Kizu Naoko.” 2006. 19 Jan. 2008.
(11)http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Wiki what?!
Welcome to the Wikipedia/Democratization and Reliability of Knowledge blog!
Be sure to check back here as my fellow team members and I dive into the world of Wikipedia.
Be sure to check back here as my fellow team members and I dive into the world of Wikipedia.
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