W12. Discuss Reagle's chapter 6 - Solène Huille

As we saw before, Wikipedia is a community with many different contributors from many countries and all over the world. One of the most important principle of this free and universal encyclopedia is the openness. Everyone can edit. But, like in every organization, Wikipedia needs to have an authority to work well, to control some contents and especially the discussions between members. On Wikipedia, there is the model of "benevolent dictatorship".
At the beginning, the founders have the authority and were mediators.
But the community grew up and now benevolent dictators are people who are able to control dispute and disagreements between Wikipedia users. They have a strong personality and a high involvement on edits and discussions. They are really active on Wikipedia.
One interesting point for me is that Wikipedia is not an anarchy, not a democracy, not an aristocracy and not a monarchy. So, the authority should be defined in a different way, especially it is really important to vote and to respect the opinions of each other.
I have one question: Is it always the best option to have benevolent dictators in a online community like Wikipedia?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

W3. Why do you think people use Wikipedia? Why do others write for it? - Sun bo Sim

 Why do you think people use Wikipedia? Why do others write for it? 1. Summary It is quite natural that the main purpose people use Wikipedia is to get information. So I thought about why people choose Wikipedia for getting information. I think the first reason is the reliability of information in Wikipedia. We have many other sources of getting information. We can search for information scattered on the web through search tools such as Google or Naver. But we do not have the ability to ensure that such data are reliable. However, people prefer Wikipedia because it looks at its slogan " The Free Encyclopedia, " believing it may have the character of an encyclopedia. I also believe that Wikipedia's credibility is enhanced by the fact that its information is constantly being edited through the process of collective intelligence. 2. Interesting Point Most people use Wikipedia to get information. However, some people like to make new articles and give information s...
Read more

W6. How important is it to be civil online on the Internet?-Ji Young An

These days lots of controversial problems are rising. And because of those problems, people fight on the Internet. But I think most of problems happen because of a lack of civic attitudes. As I highlighted the discussion section of Wikipedia last post, talking together with having civic attitudes is very important point. On the Internet lots of people meet. And this means all of them has different thinking and experiences different cultures. So it is certain that everyone's opinion is different. But I think from this difference, the collective intelligence comes. So I think this difference is very important. But sadly, because of this difference some people fight, just arguing their opinion is one hundred percent right. This attitude is nothing good to our collective intelligence. To develop collective intelligence, people need the civic attitudes. Not just persisting stubbornly they should talk and listen, trying to understand other people. If they talk their opinion or thinking...
Read more

W5. Can we trust Wikipedia? Yun-Jin Kim

Then I want to ask. Can we trust News? I think Wikipedia is based on sources. Every time we edit on Wikipedia we need the sources. If we don’t put sources, the information we wrote would be deleted.   So I think asking ‘How can we trust Wikipedia’ is kind of similar to ‘How can we trust News’. I know there could be subjective opinion on Wikipedia. If the topic is unpopular, the public opinion doesn’t focus, there’s could be no feedback and that makes Wiki subjective. for this reason, we have to think before we choose the topic in Wiki. If the topic isn’t famous enough and have no sources, we should think this information isn’t sure enough. but if the topic has clear sources we can have a trust on that information. I think it is not important to ask, ‘is the Wikipedia trustful’. It is important to ask ‘is this information on Wikipedia has a exact source?’.
Read more