TED talk – Jimmy Wales on the creation of Wikipedia
· Wikipedia is a concept where every person in the world could have access to the sum of all human knowledge for free, and is freely sharable and adaptable as per the essence of creative commons.
· Wikipedia is written and maintained by volunteers using the wiki editing software that anyone can freely learn to use. To me this represents a strong sign of a participatory culture as proposed by Jenkins and is also an example of Suroweikis “Wisdom of Crowds” as per the video I sourced and shared in last week’s notes.
· Wikipedia’s model is one of a “not for profit” organisation that allows users to use its content for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.
· Wikipedia is funded by public donations
· Wikipedia has many articles across many languages, with only 1/3 being English; it would be interesting to see if many of these are translated to other languages so that those from other cultural backgrounds can more easily consume information from other cultures.
· Wikipedia’s organisation structure allows for minimal staff and minimal costs. In my reflection on this I considered if a global news organisation could be built on a similar model – funded by the public, with content managed by volunteers. I think an issue could be that news sites differ from encyclopaedias in that news can be opinionated and positioned within certain social contexts, whilst the information within online encyclopaedias like Wikipedia’s can be more fact based (black and white). This could cause more conflicts within the public sphere of a “wiki news” website and thus would have to be structured slightly differently I believe.
· The accuracy of the Wikipedia is equal to that found in traditional encyclopaedia media.
· Controversial topics within Wikipedia are highly edited and subject to quality control within the Wikipedia community. I see this as a form of collective gate keeping within the community which in traditional media was done by editors and publishers. In Wikipedia quality control takes place via:
§ Neutral point of view policy: similar to the objectivity found in tradition media in the early 20th century as discussed in the Wall reading. In a Wikipedia framework this allows a diverse set of people to contribute and cooperate together.
§ Real time Peer Review: Every alteration made is listed on a recent changes page, thus users can monitor the changes on topics and pages they have an interest in. Community of participants work on Wikipedia content, and monitor it changes as it is the passion of the community which generates the high quality of work.
· Governance Model:
§ Consensus on content
§ Democracy – Trusted administrators elected by community
§ Aristocracy – In community where respected participants hold power via the credibility and authenticity
§ Monarchy – Free software model allows for a singular go-to point for ultimate decision making within the project
· In reflection on this video of Jimmy Wales at TED I think it strongly demonstrates that active participatory culture can indeed act as a gatekeeper to its content.
The video also points out that different economic models can support online communities and content on a global scale, previous only seen in corporatized websites, due to the reduced cost of product and distribution of content online. This made me consider the funding models proposed by Mignon Shardlow in the Week 8 MED104 lecture that proposed a model of possible public funding of news organisations.
I see some issue with this as news can tend to be information of interest with short time frames where the community will participate in a single topic, and can be on a more localised scale and thus there would have to be smaller localised communities. This would lead me to consider just to what scale a “wiki news” type model maybe effective as if the community is too small questions of credibility in gate keeping, authenticity and accuracy could arise when a topic becomes too small a niche as news articles could be more susceptible to opinion rather in comparison to the fact based content which I think is more representative of an online encyclopaedia.
Overall I think the value present in information sharing models such as Wikipedia can be found in the participation of people within their own cultures of interest, where they can present a clear framework for this information within a particular social or cultural context as seen earlier in the course when discussing pop-cosmopolitanism where each culture has a repository for its own cultural content that can be easily accessed via online search and thus present a possibility to understand social cultural issues from many different contexts to find workable solutions for all.
· Wikipedia is a concept where every person in the world could have access to the sum of all human knowledge for free, and is freely sharable and adaptable as per the essence of creative commons.
· Wikipedia is written and maintained by volunteers using the wiki editing software that anyone can freely learn to use. To me this represents a strong sign of a participatory culture as proposed by Jenkins and is also an example of Suroweikis “Wisdom of Crowds” as per the video I sourced and shared in last week’s notes.
· Wikipedia’s model is one of a “not for profit” organisation that allows users to use its content for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.
· Wikipedia is funded by public donations
· Wikipedia has many articles across many languages, with only 1/3 being English; it would be interesting to see if many of these are translated to other languages so that those from other cultural backgrounds can more easily consume information from other cultures.
· Wikipedia’s organisation structure allows for minimal staff and minimal costs. In my reflection on this I considered if a global news organisation could be built on a similar model – funded by the public, with content managed by volunteers. I think an issue could be that news sites differ from encyclopaedias in that news can be opinionated and positioned within certain social contexts, whilst the information within online encyclopaedias like Wikipedia’s can be more fact based (black and white). This could cause more conflicts within the public sphere of a “wiki news” website and thus would have to be structured slightly differently I believe.
· The accuracy of the Wikipedia is equal to that found in traditional encyclopaedia media.
· Controversial topics within Wikipedia are highly edited and subject to quality control within the Wikipedia community. I see this as a form of collective gate keeping within the community which in traditional media was done by editors and publishers. In Wikipedia quality control takes place via:
§ Neutral point of view policy: similar to the objectivity found in tradition media in the early 20th century as discussed in the Wall reading. In a Wikipedia framework this allows a diverse set of people to contribute and cooperate together.
§ Real time Peer Review: Every alteration made is listed on a recent changes page, thus users can monitor the changes on topics and pages they have an interest in. Community of participants work on Wikipedia content, and monitor it changes as it is the passion of the community which generates the high quality of work.
· Governance Model:
§ Consensus on content
§ Democracy – Trusted administrators elected by community
§ Aristocracy – In community where respected participants hold power via the credibility and authenticity
§ Monarchy – Free software model allows for a singular go-to point for ultimate decision making within the project
· In reflection on this video of Jimmy Wales at TED I think it strongly demonstrates that active participatory culture can indeed act as a gatekeeper to its content.
The video also points out that different economic models can support online communities and content on a global scale, previous only seen in corporatized websites, due to the reduced cost of product and distribution of content online. This made me consider the funding models proposed by Mignon Shardlow in the Week 8 MED104 lecture that proposed a model of possible public funding of news organisations.
I see some issue with this as news can tend to be information of interest with short time frames where the community will participate in a single topic, and can be on a more localised scale and thus there would have to be smaller localised communities. This would lead me to consider just to what scale a “wiki news” type model maybe effective as if the community is too small questions of credibility in gate keeping, authenticity and accuracy could arise when a topic becomes too small a niche as news articles could be more susceptible to opinion rather in comparison to the fact based content which I think is more representative of an online encyclopaedia.
Overall I think the value present in information sharing models such as Wikipedia can be found in the participation of people within their own cultures of interest, where they can present a clear framework for this information within a particular social or cultural context as seen earlier in the course when discussing pop-cosmopolitanism where each culture has a repository for its own cultural content that can be easily accessed via online search and thus present a possibility to understand social cultural issues from many different contexts to find workable solutions for all.