Licensing
'wikipedia' Tag
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Closed-source papers on open source communities: a problem and a partial solution
June 12, 2011In the Wikipedia research community — that is, the group of academics and Wikipedians who are interested in studying Wikipedia — there has been a pretty substantial and longstanding problem with how research is published. Academics, from graduate students to tenured faculty, are deeply invested and entrenched in an system that rewards the publication of [...]
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The Lives of Bots
March 5, 2011I’m part of a Wikipedia research group called “Critical Point of View” centered around the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. (Just a disclaimer, the term ‘critical’ is more like critical theory as opposed to Wikipedia bashing for its own sake.) We’ve had some great conferences and [...]
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The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal
October 28, 2009With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on [...]
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Wikisym Poster: The Social Roles of Bots and Assisted Editing Tools
October 24, 2009This 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 [...]
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WikiConference New York: An Open Unconference
September 7, 2009A 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 [...]
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Working Within Wikipedia: Infrastructures of Knowing and Knowledge Production
March 30, 2009While Wikipedia does have epistemic standards, the open question is how such an epistemology can be operationalized and enforced.
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Evolving Governance and Media Use in Wikipedia: A Historical Account
January 23, 2009In an age of information overload, the history of Wikipedia’s co-evolving media use and governance model gives us a powerful lesson regarding the way in which the development of social structures and media technologies are fundamentally interrelated in the digital era.
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Do you support Wikipedia? News from the Trenches of the Science Wars 2.0
December 8, 2008I 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 asking what Wikipedia has done to reality, I ask: what have we done to Wikipedia in the name of reality?
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Researching Wikipedia Holistically: A Tentative Approach
October 11, 2008This 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 [...]
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Video: Conceptions and Misconceptions Academics Hold About Wikipedia
August 15, 2008The good folks at the Library of Alexandria and Kaltura have made available videos of a good number of presentations from Wikimania 2008. Luckily, mine was one of the ones up! So without further ado: