On 14 March 2010 13:48, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I read the first description and my brain went
"Danger! Danger! Pomo
bollocks publication-credit-generator critical mass!" The others
weren't any better. If actual Wikipedians weren't involved I'd think
considerably less of it ... Can anyone translate the jargon-riddled
descriptions into something that wouldn't make any sane human want to
cut off all academic funding forever?
Most Wikipedia-related research we've seen so far is pretty
down-and-dirty stuff; studies of accuracy and revert patterns and
growth rates and contributor dynamics and so on. As time goes on (and
we become more ubiquitous) we find we get studied as a concept -
another level or two of academic abstraction above this.
It's not a bad thing, by any means, but it does mean that it's
relatively vague by the standards we're used to, and it's much less -
well, less practically useful to us rather than to people who study
the abstracted stuff. (If you think of these people as historians
rather than scientific analysts, it might be clearer - they're more
detatched, from our perspective)
This, for example, talks about Wikipedia, but at a level we don't need
to worry about on a day-to-day basis:
"Joseph Reagle makes a broader argument that reference works can serve
as a flashpoint for larger social anxieties about technological and
social change. With this understanding in hand, he tries to make sense
of the social unease embodied in and prompted by Wikipedia..."
This may tell us something interesting about how we practically implement NPOV:
"... the interpretations of the Neutral Point of View policy that
accompanied the production of the politically contentious Wikipedia
article documenting Israel's invasion of the Gaza strip in the winter
of 2008/2009. He will show how these negotiations reveal ... Wikipedia
editors are guided by a moral sense of what is and is not a legitimate
intervention in their productive process."
(The later papers generally seem a bit more interesting and less... abtruse)
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk