This was part of the opening keynote in Wikimania 2008, given by the Egyptian Deputy Minister of Communication and IT, Hoda Baraka. Here are my notes, again without any commentary - I apologize for them not being cleaner.
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The official theme or slogan for this year’s Wikimania is “the knowledge revolution that is changing wisdom.” I think this phrase – especially the difference between knowledge and wisdom – was chosen very carefully and I think it is an excellent distinction to make. This morning’s opening ceremony began with a speech from the Egyptian Minister of State for Administrative Development, Dr. Ahmed Darwish. I will relay his comments here, without much analysis - that will come later, when I have the time.
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I am currently in Egypt for Wikimania 2008, which is being held this year at the Library of Alexandria. On Sunday, I will be presenting my ethnographic analysis of conceptions and misconceptions academics hold about Wikipedia. This presentation was going to be about old, computer-illiterate professors but has turned into something much more interesting: a commentary on Wikipedia’s status in the so-called postmodern digital humanities. I will update the post on this site as I finalize my presentation.
I will also be blogging and Twittering about the conference. Stay tuned for updates.
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 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.
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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