W4. Discuss Reagle's Chapters 1-2 / posted by Sojeong Yeon

  

1. Summary

 

   The vision of Wikipedia, the encyclopedia and its community and culture are introduced in chapter 1. 'The vision of Wikipedia' is that “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." People work together to build thing of value by bringing all the mental wealth of our world. It is a practical activities. The encyclopedia they are making could solve the global problems. As Alain Coulon said, it is “the study of the methods that members use in their daily lives that enable them to live together and to govern their social relationships, whether conflictual or harmonious.”

   There are the basic practices and norms of English Wikipedia which the tens of thousands of active contributors are familiar with. First, there are the actual Wikipedia pages, edits and the discussion page associated with each article on which people can converse about the article. There are mailing lists on which more abstract or particularly difficult issues are often discussed. Also there are the physical spaces in which some community members interact.

   Wikipedia has 'the culture'-the practices, discussion, and policies. The awarding of a “barnstar,” an image placed on another’s user page to recognize merit is one of the wiki practice. These awards are part of the Kindness Campaign and are meant to promote civility and WikiLove. As in any other community, there is also a history of events, set of norms, constellation of values, and common lingo at Wikipedia. Then, there are three policies of “Neutral Point of View,” “No Original Research,” and “Verifiability.” The NPOV policy which seeks the fair presentation of all sides of the dispute recognizes the multitude of viewpoints. “No Original Research” and “Verifiability” are both about meaning, “All material in Wikipedia must be attributable to a reliable, published source."

   The projects discussed in chapter 2 -Project Xanadu, Project Gutenberg, Interpedia, Nupedia, GNUPedia/GNE- are attempts at realizing a universal vision. The vision persisted throughout the twentieth century. Even unfulfilled visions, failed projects tell us something about those people and their time. The history described in chapter 2 speaks to the alluring and enduring notion of an ambitious project of human knowledge production.

 

2. Interesting thing

 

   First, the interest thing is that “half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users” as Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia cofounder, said. It means few logged in users are making hard a lot of edits and they contributes their knowledge continuously. And I was also surprised that overall conflict and coordination tasks are growing faster than that of editing encyclopedic articles. This shows that how many people are communicating with each others and how many discussions are made in Wikipedia.

   Second, the other interest thing is there are different stars for dozens of virtues, including random acts of kindness, diligence, anti-vandalism, good humor, resilience, brilliance, and teamwork. I didn't know there are those practices before. This practice encourage wikipedians to participate in Wikipedia more and make them become an enthusiastic contributors.

 

3. Discussion question

 

   After reading the chapter 1-2 of this book, I am just curious to other Wikis. What's the difference between the Wikipedia and other Korean Wiki such as Namuwiki? How Namuwiki has developed over the past years? I want to discuss this question regarding the success factors of Wikipedia and the difference between the Korean Wikis and Wikipedia.