This week, I’m presenting a poster at WikiSym 2009 on “The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools.”  Most of the work is distilled from my thesis.

Abstract: This project investigates various software programs as non-human social actors in Wikipedia, arguing that their influence must not be overlooked in research of the on-line encyclopedia project. Using statistical and archival methods, the roles of assisted editing programs and bots are examined. First, the proportion of edits made by these non-human actors is significantly more than previously described in earlier research. Second, these actors have moved into new spaces, changing not just the practice of article writing and reviewing, but also administrative work.

Download the Poster (PDF)

Download the Extended Abstract (PDF)

And if you are interested in this topic, check out the full paper, The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal.

Jimmy Wales speaking at the conference keynote, by GreenReaper, CC BY-SA 3.0

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of presenting at the first (hopefully annual) WikiConference New York, sponsored by the Wikimedia New York City chapter with assistance from Free Culture @ NYU and the Information Law Institute at NYU’s law school. I know that I am atrociously late in writing this post, but I’m not really writing it for the Wikipedians out there. Rather, the WikiConference was an interesting experiment that seemed to apply Wikipedia’s philosophy towards editing to a conference, resulting in what the organizers called a “modified unconference.”
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Here are the slides from a paper I presented at the Science and Technology in Society Conference, hosted by the AAAS this past weekend. I won an award for top paper in my section for it – so I’m pretty happy about it. The full paper is not up because it is a Frankenstein assemblage from my thesis, which I’ll be finishing up in less than a month.

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This is an abstract for a paper that I will be presenting at Media in Transition 6, which will be held at MIT from April 24th to the 26th.
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This is a paper I wrote for a class on “Technology and Critique” – a class that blended critical theory with Science and Technology Studies.  Taking from Bruno Latour’s “Do you believe in Reality?  News from the Trenches of the Science Wars,” this work is a critical examination of the way in which the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia has been implicitly cast as a continuation of the Science Wars.  Instead of debating about the efficacy and authority of science, academics are now debating the efficacy and authority of Wikipedia. Using Martin Heidegger’s work on ontology and technology, I argue that this particular academic mindset is a way of being-in-the-world that works to either affirm or negate the integration of Wikipedia into its particular projects – namely, the production of academic knowledge.  However, I show that asking whether Wikipedia is a reliable academic source enframes Wikipedia into an objectless standing-reserve of potential citations, foreclosing many other possibilities for its use.  Instead of following Steven Colbert and countless academics by asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality?

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In Talking About Machines: Ethnography of a Modern Job, Julian Orr studies the teams of Xerox photocopier technicians who are ostensibly responsible for fixing broken copiers. In his ethnographic study of work practice” (10), he aims to examine the concept of work solely from the worker’s perspective, and begins by giving the reader five “vignettes of work in the field” (14). These stories detail how technicians interact with customers, copiers, and each other, leading Orr to declare that technicians are responsible for the upkeep of more than just machines. In fact, he sees their work “is to maintain a triangular relationship between the technicians, their customers, and their machines” (66). It is this insight that powers Orr’s study, making it something far more than a patchwork of its constituent elements: ethnomethodology, organizational communication, business administration, conversation analysis, ethnography of work, human-computer/machine interaction, and infrastructure studies.
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When I took my first Physics class as a High School student, my rather inept lab team developed a catchphrase that was frequently invoked when our experiments resulted in data that wildly contradicted the accepted scientific theory: “Mr. Evans,” we would say to our teacher in a mockingly-apologetic tone, “We broke Physics.” Every time without fail, he would dash our hopes by showing us that we had not yet succeeded in breaking his prized subject; indeed, it we poor experimentalists who were broken and must be repaired. This had the immediate effect of us manipulating the experiment to achieve the predicted result, instead of the traditionally-understood method of using experimentation to arrive at a theory. However, this manipulation was simply for the grade; raised on stories of intrepid and independent scientists, we held out for the day when we would break that monolithic institution by discovering an anomaly that would give us agency over the theories and equations instead of the other way around. Putting aside any Friereian critiques of the student/teacher pedagogic model, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions provides an interesting explanation for this story.

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This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of academic disciplines, then proceed to a detailed but sparse review of certain prior research on Wikipedia. By examining the problems in previous research within the context of disciplines, I establish a tentative methodology for a holistic study of Wikipedia.
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As some of you might know, I work part-time at the Federation of American Scientists. Most of what I do has involved the creation of a wiki for virtual worlds, and I am proud to say that it is ready for the world. It is not simply a wiki, but a structured semantic wiki. This means that when you edit a page on a virtual world, you get a customizable form instead of a massive textbox. Check it out!

The Virtual Worlds Almanac

As someone who studies Internet culture, one of my biggest problems is “link rot,” or broken links.  I’m a big fan of the Internet Archive, but they are usually six to eight months behind on even the most popular sites.  I also applaud sites like Wikipedia for providing stable version histories so that I can point to a specific revision of a page.  However, for all other websites, the only option is self-archiving, which is technically difficult and fraught with problems.  What I have found incredibly useful is WebCite, a free webpage archiving service that fills in this gap.

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