Week 5: Wikis - The Wikipedia, Collective Intelligence & Communal Authorship

Week 5: Wikis - The Wikipedia, Collective Intelligence & Communal Authorship

This week please read the following texts and follow-up the various websites:

On wikis

Context:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

Jaron Lanier, DIGITAL MAOISM:The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism [5.30.06], The Edge: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html

Stacy Schiff, "Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?", The New Yorker, (Issue of 2006-07-31, Posted 2006-07-24) http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060731fa_fact

Clay Shirky, "Social Software and the Politics of Groups," (First published March 9, 2003 on the "Networks, Economics, and Culture" mailing list.) : http://shirky.com/writings/group_politics.html

Historical Blog:
Christopher Allen, Tracing the Evolution of Social Software:(accessed August 2006) http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/10/tracing_the_evo.html

Technical:

Comparison of Wiki software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software

Network Theory

Some Network Theory: Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, "Dawn of the Organised Networks," FibreCulture Journal Issue 5: http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/lovink_rossiter.html

On Gendered Technologies:

Dong-Hoo Lee, Women's Creation of Camera Phone Culture,FibreCulture Journal Issue 6: http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue6/issue6_donghoo.html

Websites:

Wikis

Wikipedia - main portal -http://wikipedia.org/
Commercial wiki site - http://wiki.com/

Social Networking and Collaborative Authoring:

Secondlife: http://www.secondlife.com

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/

Friendster:http://www.friendster.com/

SmallWorld: http://www.asmallworld.net/login.php

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/

Collaborative Journalism:

Reporters without Borders: http://www.rsf.org/

Indymedia: http://www.indymedia.org/en/index.shtml

Wikinews: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page

Blogger: http://www.blogger.com

Collaborative and "groupware" software traces its history back through the 20th century to the origins of computing, and indeed might be seen as an underpinning premise of "technological utopias" (or dystopias) in earlier speculative fiction (cf. Orwell's "1984" or Wells "Things to Come" (http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/w#a30 and http://www.archive.org/details/ThingstoCome).)

However, since the late 1990's the technology has really come into its own as a result of broad distribution via the internet - or, in fact, via the enabling technologies of the internet (i.e. as hosted collaborative sites). This has given rise to a massive profusion of websites, ranging from collaborative online encyclopaedias (eg. wikipedia, nupedia), to deeply interconnected blogging sites (eg. blogger) and thence to "social networking" sites such a Youtube, Friendster and so forth.

Consider the following questions in light of the readings:

1] What are the benefits and pitfalls of this collaborative media landscape? Examine the events surrounding the Nature Magazine/Enclopaedia Brittanica/Wikipedia controversy (see: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia , http://micheladrien.blogspot.com/2005/12/following-wikipedia-controversy...)

2] What are the conflicts between authoritative representations of knowledge and the sorts of "freedoms of scale" that collaborative environments enable?

3] Contrarily, are collaborative spaces simply convenient grounds for the propagation of public and institutional myths (and memes)?

4] How do we, us users, distinguish between verifiable content in this massively distributed media-landscape (composed from a plethora of often indistinguishable sources) and falsehoods, flamebaits, economically-motivated content (eg. astroturfing) and so forth.

5] What are the differences between "texts" such as wikipedia and myspace or youtube?

6] How does one balance the trade-off between publically-available information and the actuality of being a data-mining target for transnational conglomerates and government? Consider the recent AOL data scandal in this light (eg. http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2006/08/07/aol-gate-search-query-data... , http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/07/aol_search_logs/ and http://www.memepool.com/Subject/Security/).