In the paper “Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces” written by Paul Dourish and Victoria Bellotti, the authors describe awareness as: “an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity” (Dourish 107). This concept appears several times in the various Wikipedia research papers. We can also see that as Wikipedia changes and evolves one of the key aspects of successful awareness, passive awareness rather than active awareness, is potentially being eroded. Finally, the definition of awareness as described by Dourish and Bellotti was written almost 20 years ago and certainly was not considering a collaborative effort such as Wikipedia, there are considerations and alterations should be taken into consideration when looking at awareness in an environment such as Wikipedia.
The article “Lifting the Veil: Improving Accountability and social Transparency in Wikipedia with WikiDashboard” discusses the issue Wikipedia faces with quality and accountability while proposing a potential solution. The main focus of the article is the WikiDashboard application that the authors created, however the reason this application is created is to address the transparency issue with Wikipedia.
“Despite their tremendous success, collaborative models of knowledge building are still viewed with skepticism. The quality, accountability, and trustworthyness of the articles in Wikipedia has been debated heavily in the press” (Bongwon 1037).
This distrust is the result of the disconnect of awareness between the Wikipedia readers and the Wikipedia writers, who of course can be the same individuals but in many cases are not. When a reader of a Wikipedia article cannot say for sure who has wr...
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...Lifting the veil: improving accountability and social transparency in Wikipedia with wikidashboard Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems 1037-1040.
Bryant, Forte and Bruckman (2005) Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of Participation in a Collaborative Online Encyclopedia Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work (GROUP'05) 1-10.
Kittur, Suh, Pendleton and Chi (2007) He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI'07) 453-462.
Butler, Joyce and Pike (2008) Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy: the nature and roles of policies and rules in wikipedia Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI'08) 1101-1110.
Sean Kamperman the author of “The Wikipedia Game: Boring, Pointless, or Neither” believes that wikipedia can be helpful with educational learning purposes. Wikipedia is known for plagiarism and fake information. People make Wikipedia have a bad reputation in schools especially in english classes. Wikipedia can be a source of entertainment and self improvement for some people. Some people might just research stuff on Wikipedia to find interesting articles. In “Wikihunt” many Wikipedia users have “discovered” a game of their own, this involves creativity so it brings out the creative qualities of people. Wikipedia is a educational game and it's also free it's convenient for people. The game “Wikihunt” involves two people in separate computers
The internet is a hub of information. It is easy to access this information and resources by simple looking up a simple topic. How much of this information is actually true? In The New Yorker article “The Things People Say” author Elizabeth Kolbert explains the dangers of believing wholeheartedly the information given to us online. She uses logos to prove that the internet can be biased with information through “group polarization” and a site’s inability to upload contradictory information. She fails however with ethos in her paper because she is hypocritical.
The Wikipedia Collective. (2010, February 22). Mark Morris. Retrieved February 28, 2010, from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Morris
As Wikipedia has become more and more popular with students, some professors have become increasingly concerned about the online, reader-produced encyclopedia. While plenty of professors have complained about the lack of accuracy or completeness of entries, and some have discouraged or tried to bar students from using it.
The common man/woman writes Wikipedia. There is no peer review, there are no editors, and there are no revision dates. In fact, Wikipedia encourages and advises its users to verify the information presented in its content. One positive characteristic Wikipedia has is its currency. An article in another encyclopedia may take months to write, but contributors often write articles on Wikipedia within a month of the occurrence of an event. Another positive feature is its popularity. Millions of users use Wikipedia. It provides dependable material, resolves their questions, and besides, Wikipedia is easy to use.
Wheeler, S., Yeomans, P., & Wheeler, D. (2008). The good, the bad and the wiki: Evaluatingstudent-generated content for collaborative learning. British Journal for Educational Technology, 39(6), 987-995.
Despite our English teachers’ best efforts each and every one of us at some point in our writing careers have stumbled upon a source of information from the infamous website Wikipedia. In this article the writer discusses both the pros and the cons of the controversial online encyclopedia in an attempt to allow us to come up with our own conclusions about it’s credibility as a source. Wikipedia provides a vast array of articles, over 31 million, on numerous topics. Some of the benefits of Wikipedia include its user friendly site. With its easy to maneuver layout and useful sub-links to help direct you, it’s easy to see why some favor this popular search. This setup allows for you to find new possible connections between subjects while also brainstorm different unique ideas to link with your paper.
The web has spurred communities exclusive to nerds. "News for nerds. Stuff that matters," reads the slogan of popular blog Slashdot. This blog, which receives 5.5 million visits a month, reports on “Linux, Technology, Games, Apple, and Science”. Voted on Yahoo in 2001 as the “Best Geek Hangout,” it has truly created a community for nerds to discuss their interests. As a result, the site sees active participation from its readers who discuss with others around the world with similar interests. These virtual conversations provide an outlet for visitors to express interests that they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to. Unlike other popular blogs, Slashdot publishes user submitted content alongside editor created. Because the minimum threshold of knowledge needed to contribute to the d...
Wikipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia, is extremely beneficial to people who want facts, not opinions, on a wide range of topics. Occasionally, a volunteer editor will insert his or her opinion while creating or editing a page, as was the case with Leonardo DiCaprio's Wikipedia page when someone edited the page and wrote "FINALLY HAS A GODD***ED OSCAR" repeatedly, spoiling the actor's Wikipedia page. While Leonardo DiCaprio did finally win an Oscar for his work, the edit clearly shows bias, violating Wikipedia's regulations. Public figures, including politicians, authors and entrepreneurs, should have a Wikipedia page so that when people are looking for factual information, it is easy to find. A person needn't be as famous as Leonardo
Wikipedia is a free virtual encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone, who can be anonymous or recognized by their true identity. The website allows anyone to add or delete information, which explains why the website’s information is frequently updated. Unfortunately, the website can be edited so easily, people tend to take advantage of this privilege of editing freely. Anonymous users often add false, offensive, or inappropriate texts or images that can cause confusion or problems for other people. Wikipedia is not a reliable website for educational use because of the lack of trust, absence of revision of accuracy, and publicity damage to the website.
Lundin, Rebecca W. "Teaching with Wikis: Toward a Networked Pedagogy." Computers and Composition 25.4 (2008): 432-48. Science Direct. Elsevier Inc., 2008. Web. 8 Nov. 2013. .
As one of the first places people turn to for information, Wikipedia is lacking articles about topics ranging from indigenous peoples to black history. Volunteer editors, primarily males in high-income countries with access to high speed Internet connections, create pages about people and events that are familiar to them, leaving gaps in coverage. To fill in the gaps, the Wikipedia foundation sponsors edit-a-thons; this past October was the Indigenous Peoples' Day edit-a-thon. During the San Diego, California event, volunteers from the United States, Canada and Mexico created pages about notable Native Americans, tribes and Indigenous historical figures to expand Wikipedia's coverage of disenfranchised peoples.
What most people do not seem to understand is that "Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, written collaboratively by the people who use it."(add source) There are thousands of people around the world who are either making a new page, rewriting or correcting information, or adding information at any given time during the day.
Wikipedia was launched on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, the site was designed to complement Nupedia, an online encyclopedia designed to be edited by experts (this information was sited from Wikipedia due to the lack of information available on Nupedia). This sounds like it would be a good source then if it is complementing information from a site that is edited only by experts, unfortunately if you tried to go to Nupedia.com you will be meet by a slow connection or a timeout. I was able to get to the site once and was not meet with limited information, so Wikipedia took over and began to grow. I will tell you there are good things about Wikipedia, it is a great site to get an understanding of information, some instructors may advise their students to read entries for scientific concepts on Wikipedia as a way to begin understanding those concepts (Harvard College Writing Program, 2014). After some of my research most sites do encourage Wikipedia as a starting point but to be careful due to the fac...
Before the creation of the internet, humans had no easy way of accessing any type of information. Individuals resorted to physical, written documents like encyclopedias, journals, newspapers, and magazines for the learning of new material; these were some of the only ways of evidencing claims and proving facts. After the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, humans are now being constantly bombarded with deceivingly numerous amounts of information and media content. Since most of the 21st century generation was born with the aforementioned convenient means of discovering and learning new things, most people often bypass the influence they can have on their lives. The internet serves as a mode of mass communication,...