It is 12:16 AM on a Sunday night, and I just spent this wonderful weekend inside, working on a paper. I am tired and just want to go to bed, but I am - for some reason - here, typing. I have not updated this site in over a week and feel some obligation to write a new post. Why? Obviously this would make sense if this site had a large number of readers, or even a few dedicated ones I knew enjoyed my random musings. In that case, I would be fulfilling some sort of obligation to a group of humans, something I don’t really have a problem with. However, to the best of my knowledge, there are no humans for whom this is being written. Instead, the main impetus to my post is initiated by an obligation to the software upon which this site runs.
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I was watching MSNBC’s election coverage of the South Dakota and Montana primaries on June 3rd, and heard Brian Williams make a very interesting statement. He was talking about how surprised he was to see the resurgence of political rallies in this age, and said that people his age thought the whole idea of the rally died in 1968. He then, almost wistfully, stated that this election is showing how we still need a physical community even though we are all digitally connected 24/7. I’ll quote from the transcript:
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I’ve been tossing around this concept of the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information (memes) that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them. Now, if semiotics has taught me anything, it is that the sign is nothing but a social construction, and I do not intend to make the mistake of attributing intrinsic value to any meme. Obviously, how someone feels about anything is a way you can learn about them, but these concepts are so vague that they rarely have a stable, concise definition.
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I’ve been doing a lot of work with copyright and software licenses for my new job at the Federation of American Scientists, and I’ve come upon a strange situation that someone else has bound to have thought about before. The GNU Free Documentation License, the copyleft license that Wikipedia, the Free Software Foundation, and many others use to ensure open access as well as the right to modify and re-release their text-based works, is itself not licensed under the GNU FDL or any similar scheme. Instead, the freedom to modify the license is explicitly denied.
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10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn’t Help by Benjamin Wiker
I recently picked this up while browsing the philosophy section of a local bookstore. On a side note, I love to look at what different bookstores call “Philosophy,” as they often differ greatly. Anyways, the title intrigued me and I picked it up and started reading, as I had a good bit of time to waste. I had a good idea of what the ten books would be (some Marx, Hitler, Nietzsche, among others). I’ll save you all the trouble and post the list here, with descriptions from the publisher:
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This is a paper I am presenting at Wikimania 2008, the international conference of those involved with or interested in Wikipedia, Wiktonary, Wikibooks, or any other wiki under the Wikimedia Foundation umbrella. This presentation will be about the relationship between Wikipedia and Academia from the academic point of view.
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This presentation was adapted from a chapter in my Senior thesis on Wikipedia’s legal system that focused on a dispute over the inclusion of images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in an article about him, using a methodology of communicative ethnography. Most who opposed the image were not familiar with Wikipedia’s unique method of content regulation and dispute resolution, as well as its editorial standards and principles. However, most who argued in favor of keeping the image knew these and initially used them to their advantage. This ethnographic study of the communicative strategies used by the parties involved in the dispute shows how new editors to the user-written encyclopedia first emerged in a hostile communicative environment and subsequently adapted their argumentative strategies. This conflict is an excellent example of how disputes are resolved in Wikipedia, showing how this new media space regulates its own content.
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Thursday, December 20, 2007
This paper is a Foucauldian account of power relations as expressed through discourse in the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia. Using Foucault’s methodology as developed in The Archaeology of Knowledge, a conflict over the existence of an article on one of Wikipedia’s competitors (Encyclopedia Dramatica) will be analyzed. By examining both official and unofficial sources, it is shown that conflicts over content in Wikipedia are structured around a network of organizing questions.
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This is an investigation into an Internet subculture which I wrote for a class I took titled “Rhetorics of Cybercultures.” It is an ethnography into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture.
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My thesis, written 2006 and 2007 in partial fulfillment of my undergraduate degree at The University of Texas at Austin, studied the legal culture of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that is collaboratively edited over one hundred thousand contributors around the world. Despite the fact that the project emphasizes freedom and gives off an aura of structurelessness, Wikipedia has a complex and often hidden legal system, dominating every contribution made to the encyclopedia. This thesis uses methods in legal anthropology to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system. No specific knowledge of Wikipedia or legal philosophy is necessary for the full comprehension of this work, although readers who are familiar with one or both might find it especially relevant.
I should note that this work has many flaws, and is currently being revised. Please send me an e-mail if you wish to cite it, as it is of a draft-like quality.
Download Democracy in Wikipedia (PDF, 1.38mb)
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