Wikipedia 360° The Good, The Bad, and the Anonymous Anne Pemberton, Coordinator of Instructional Services [email protected] Rachel Radom, Instructional Services Librarian [email protected].
Download ReportTranscript Wikipedia 360° The Good, The Bad, and the Anonymous Anne Pemberton, Coordinator of Instructional Services [email protected] Rachel Radom, Instructional Services Librarian [email protected].
Wikipedia 360°
The Good, The Bad, and the Anonymous
Anne Pemberton, Coordinator of Instructional Services [email protected]
Rachel Radom, Instructional Services Librarian [email protected]
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales:
“I get at least one e-mail a week from some college student who says `Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I quoted Wikipedia.’ And I always write back and I say, `For God’s sake, you’re in college, why are you quoting an encyclopedia?’ I got in trouble in the ninth grade for quoting Britannica, you know?”
Discussion
IS IT TRUE THAT ANYONE CAN EDIT IT?
WHAT IS IT?
IS IT GOOD?
The “Wiki” in Wikipedia
Shorter form of wiki wiki (weekie, weekie) which is from the native language of Hawaii, where it is commonly used to denote something " quick " or " fast ” A
wiki
is a collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it
Wiki History
Ward Cunningham started developing the WikiWikiWeb in 1994 to facilitate communication Named WikiWikiWeb b/c he remembered a Honolulu International Airport employee telling him to take the "Wiki Wiki" shuttle bus that runs between the airport's terminals Initially thought about calling it "QuickWeb", but later changed his mind and dubbed it "WikiWikiWeb" “World’s Oldest Wiki” http://www.c2.com/
Wikis Out There
http://wikiindex.org/
http://www.noveltwists.com/
http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Wikis_in_Onl ine_Education
How Can I Wiki?
SeaPort ( http://uncw.edu/itsd/wiki.htm
) Free and commercial wiki “farms” for people to host their wikis: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiFarms
Popular wiki farms include SeedWiki http://www.seedwiki.com
, PeanutButterWiki http://pbwiki.com/ , and Swiki http://www.swiki.net
A common wiki “engine” which implements the wiki technology is MediaWiki ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki )
The Most Famous Wiki of All …
Wikipedia
Wikipedia History
Formally began on January 15, 2001 as a complement to the
Nupedia
project
Wikipedia History
Nupedia , an earlier (now defunct) project was founded by Jimmy Wales to produce a free encyclopedia Nupedia had an elaborate multi-step peer review process, and required highly qualified contributors Writing of articles was slow throughout 2000 despite having a mailing-list of interested editors and a full time editor-in-chief (Larry Sanger)
Wikipedia History
Sanger suggested giving the new project its own name,
Wikipedia
, and Wikipedia was soon launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on January 15, 2001.
Wikipedia in 2007
Wikipedia continues to grow, with some 5 million registered editor accounts; the combined Wikipedias in all languages together contain 1.74 billion words in 7.5 million articles in approximately 250 languages; the English Wikipedia gains a steady 1,700 articles a day,with the wikipedia.org domain name ranked at around the 10th busiest on the Internet … the Essjay controversy breaks when a prominent member of Wikipedia is found to have lied about his credentials; Citizendium launches publicly …
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation , Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the 10 most visited websites in the world. In August 2002, shortly after Jimmy Wales announced that he would never run commercial advertisements on Wikipedia, the URL of Wikipedia was changed from
wikipedia.com
to
wikipedia.org
On June 20, 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation was founded
Name
Wikimedia Foundation Projects
Launched Description
Wikipedia Wiktionary Wikibooks Wikiquote Wikisource Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Incubator Wikispecies Wikinews Wikiversity 2001 01-15 2002 12-12 2003 07-10 2003 07-10 2003 11-24 2004 09-07 ?
2004 09-13 2004 12-03 2006 08-15 Encyclopedia containing more than 7 million articles in 250 languages.
Dictionary cataloging meanings, synonyms, etymologies and translations.
Collection of free educational textbooks and learning materials.
Collection of quotations structured in numerous ways.
Project to provide and translate free source documents, such as public domain texts.
Repository of images, sounds, videos and general media , containing more than 1,500,000 files.
Used to test possible new Wikimedia projects and new languages for existing projects.
Directory of species data on animalia, plantae, fungi, bacteria, archaea, protista and all other forms of life.
News source containing original reporting by citizen journalists from many countries.
Courses, course materials, tests. Announced to go into beta testing , little has been officially decided on its structure.
Wikipedia in the News
Answers.com
Nature (2005)
Compared
Wikipedia
with
Britannica Online
42 science entries blindly reviewed by experts Results:
Britannica Wikipedia
4 averaged 3 errors,
Britannica
: Study had numerous errors
Nature
: All entries were blinded
Britannica
against it articles shorter; omissions counted
Economist
(4-6-06): Study compares apples and oranges Authorities not favored, even viewed with suspicion Response: Do we really need experts for most entries in a general reference source?
Entries for pop cultural figures vs. those for great literary figures, scientists, etc.
Entry for Britney Spears longer than entry for St. Augustine
Seinfeld
longer than Shakespeare; Barbie longer than Bellow Further drawback of the
Nature
study: No comparisons of style
Delving In …
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html