a pedidos e bem resumindo<div><br></div><div>o artigo tenta discutir o tema sobre a estagnacao no crescimento do numero dos wikipedistas ...mas tenta focar nao na wikipedia-en, mas nas wikipedias de paises em desenvolvimento</div>
<div><br></div><div>apresenta um examplo de Kenya e discute se somente o acesso a internet vai significar a possibilidade de inclusao desse povo como editores e leitores da wikipedia, como - em geral - se pensa (ja li coisas assim nas paginas do Meta...ate mesmo sobre o Brasil...)</div>
<div><br></div><div>ai entra num debate relevante e atual para a lista ...o "deletismo", que hoje parece ser oficialmente chamado de <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: rgb(84, 84, 84); line-height: 17px; ">wiki-lawyering</span> ...pratica que ainda esta sob batalha em muitas wikipedias pelo mundo (ou seja, nao so os Brasileiros estao nesse momento de discussao)...ai ela apresenta um resultado de estudo que juntou dados de reversao e disse que parece que os "deletistas" estao ganhando </div>
<div> </div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: rgb(84, 84, 84); line-height: 14px; "><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4; ">
"The Palo Alto Research Center group suggested that the ‘deletionists might have won’ when they found that the number of reverted edits has increased steadily, and that occasional editors experience a visibly greater resistance compared to high-frequency editors.</p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4; ">According to Suh et al., ‘Since 2003, edits from occasional editors have been reverted (at) a higher rate than edits from prolific editors. Furthermore, this disparity of treatment of new edits from editors of different classes has been widening steadily over the years at the expense of low-frequency editors. We consider this as evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content, especially when the edits come from occasional editors’." <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">(coloca no google translator) </font></span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br></font></span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">Ai, ela aponta uma citacao que considero muito importante....</font></span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br></font></span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 17px; font-size: 12px; color: rgb(84, 84, 84); ">According to Kollock, ‘a person is motivated to contribute valuable information to the group in the expectation that one will receive useful help and information in return that is, the motivation is an anticipated reciprocity’.</span></font></span></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 1.4; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">e que ja apontei aqui...quando um contribui com boa vontade e conteudo aberto (e tempo) espera que seja bem tratado como uma questao de reciprocidade</font></span></p>
</span></div><div><br></div><div>alem da reciprocidade aponta outras motivacoes, como reputacao, senso de eficiencia, etc...como motivadores da participacao e crescimento de editores em wikipedias pelo mundo</div><div><br>
</div><div>ela conclui dizendo que mesmo existinfo wikipedias locais, em funcao dos motivadores acima e da estabilidade da wikipedia-en...pode ser que muita gente de paises em desenvolvimento acabe decidindo contribuir para a wikipedia-en e nao para wikipedia locais</div>
<div><br></div><div>bem...ai esta o resumo relampago</div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote">2011/2/18 Cecilia Tanaka <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:cecilia.tanaka@gmail.com">cecilia.tanaka@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><font size="2"><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><a href="http://hblog.org/writing/the-missing-wikipedians/" target="_blank">The Missing Wikipedians</a><br>
<br></font></font><div>
<div>
<div>
<h1><font size="4">The Missing Wikipedians</font></h1>
</div>
<div>
<p style="text-align:right"><a href="http://makebuildplay.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/makmende_essay.pdf" target="_blank">Download PDF </a>or view on <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/hfordsa/the-missing-wikipedians" target="_blank">Slideshare</a></p>
<p>Much has been said of the future of Wikipedia. Some have prophesied
that the online encyclopaedia will fail due to increasing spam. Others
have said that, as large parts of the world go online, Wikipedia might
see a wave of new editors as countries from Zambia to Indonesia begin to
fill in Wikipedia’s blank spots. In a project that aims to ‘make all
human knowledge accessible’, those blank spots can mean many things: the
hundreds of thousands of places that aren’t talked about on Wikipedia,
the thousands of languages that either don’t have their own
encyclopaedia or are struggling to build one, and the countless things
that people know about their world but aren’t in written form.</p>
<p>This essay is concerned, not so much with the future of the English
version of Wikipedia (about which much of the prophesying occurs) but
with the 277 other language Wikipedias. Will this number shrink as
editors grow tired of their lonely pursuits, or will it grow as more of
the world goes online? As large parts of Africa go online, it is
expected that they will start to edit Wikipedia and that they will edit
it in their own language. Both of these assumptions may be incorrect.
Firstly, there are a number of external and internal limitations to this
new wave of editors joining Wikipedia, and secondly, the scale of
smaller Wikipedias may mean that they are over-shadowed by stronger
motivations to edit the larger, more powerful English version.</p>
<p><strong>‘Makmende’s so huge, he can’t fit in Wikipedia<a href="http://hblog.org/writing/the-missing-wikipedians/#_ftn2" target="_blank">[2]</a>’ </strong></p>
<p>In mid-2010, a furore erupted in a small corner of the Internet. The
facts sounded all-too familiar: another group of Wikipedia editors
fighting over whether something was notable or not. The so-called
‘deletionists’ against the ‘inclusionists’ – those who thought that the
encyclopaedia needed to retain a certain quality and that strict
editorial control was necessary, versus those who thought that
Wikipedia’s goal is to be a different encyclopaedia – one that is much
broader and more global than any other existing encyclopaedia.</p>
<p>But a closer look at this blip on Wikipedia’s radar exposed some
interesting details – details that exposed this as a story that
epitomises Wikipedia’s current growth problems and the challenges it
faces as it seeks to ‘make all human knowledge accessible’. The
frontline of this battle: a page called ‘Makmende’ that was struggling
to be born on the English encyclopaedia.</p>
<p>In March of 2010, Kenya had enjoyed what has been touted as its first
viral Internet sensation. While even Eastern Europe has had its share
of singing kittens and political remixes, this East African country had
not enjoyed the success that comes when the world recognises a local
meme that captures the imagination of those outside of it. The meme was
based on an interesting local hack of Hollywood culture that originated
on the streets of Kenya in the 1990s.</p>
<p>The Swahili slang (sheng) word for ‘hero’, ‘Makmende’ originates from
a mispronunciation of Clint Eastwood’s phrase “Go ahead, make my day”
(Mek ma nday) – a phrase that became popular in the streets of Kenya in
the 1990s when a ‘bad guy wannabe would be called out and asked “Who do
you think you are? Makmende?”’ In early 2010, local band, ‘Just a Band’
resurrected the fictional Kenyan superhero in the music video for their
song <em>Ha-He</em>. In the music video for their song, the band
features Makmende beating up the ‘bad guys’ and even ignoring the girl
in a hilarious throwback to the fictional character.</p>
<p>What followed was a popular acknowledgement of Makmende that
resonated outwards from local Twitter users. Like other successful
memes, Makmende enabled people to participate in the joke and to thereby
“own” a little piece of the meme. According to local digital marketing
strategist, Mark Kaigwa, people either took popular Chuck Norris jokes
and replaced them with Makmende, or they created their own. Radio
stations in Nairobi invited people to call in with Makmende jokes when
local journalists like Larry Madowo noticed the attention that Makmende
was getting on Twitter, and the Kenyan twittasphere seemed to be buzzing
with their own Chuck Norris.</p>
<p>In the midst of enthusiasm, Makmende fans tried to create a Wikipedia
page about the meme. Wikipedia admins repeatedly deleted the page,
initially on ‘criteria for speedy deletion’ G1 (‘Patent nonsense,
meaningless, or incomprehensible’), then G12 (‘Unambiguous copyright
infringement)’ and finally G3 (‘Pure Vandalism’).</p>
<p>Wikipedia editors claimed that the article needed to be deleted
because there existed ‘no reliable sources, and no claims of
notability’. Pointing to the lack of sources relating to African culture
online, user, Cicinne came back with this retort: ‘The problem is that
there is hardly any content on African influences in the 90′s and 80′s
which may make it hard to make the connections’.</p>
<p>On March 24, the Wall Street Journal’s Cassandra Vinograd commented
on the story, reporting that ‘Kenyan bloggers and Tweeters (had) seized
on the video and launched a campaign for the man they’re calling Kenya’s
very own Chuck Norris – complete with one liners about Makmende’s
superhero skills and prowess.’ According to the WSJ, Makmende had drawn
more than 24,300 hits in the week since its release and had collected
19,200 fans on Facebook.</p>
<p>The article was deleted once again, prompting Ethan Zuckerman to
write a blog post about the systemic bias operating in the encyclopaedia
community that would delete the stub:</p>
<blockquote><p>The one that’s currently under development followed a
classic Wikipedia structure – it went up as a brief stub, and has
accreted more content in the past few hours. What concerned me is that
the attempt to delete that stub argued that the article was unsourced –
actually, it was quite well sourced, including a reference to a Wall
Street Journal online publication and five weblogs. Perhaps the user who
nominated for deletion made a mistake. Or perhaps he acted in bad
faith, trying to avoid a battle over notability and tried a different
tactic to see the page removed.<br>
If Wikipedia wants to make progress in improving areas where it’s weak –
i.e., if it wants to address issues of systemic bias – the community
needs to expand to include more Wikipedians from the developing world.
Deleting three versions of an article important to Kenyans and trying to
delete a fourth doesn’t send a strong message that Wikipedia is the
open and welcoming community you and I both want it to be.</p></blockquote>
<p>After being covered on CNN, Fast Company and numerous location Kenyan
publications (most of which are not online), the article was eventually
voted ‘keep’ citing the WSJ post as proof of notability required to
survive and move past the deletion debates. The question then became: if
something needs to be ‘notable’ to get on Wikipedia, by whose standards
are we judging notability? Is it about numbers, about reputation? Can
this be measured? And would this have been such a debate if it had
occurred elsewhere in the world?</p>
<p>This story epitomises the challenges facing Wikipedia as it comes up
against the scope of a traditional encyclopaedia. Ethan Zuckerman summed
it up as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>Most Wikipedians seemed to accept the idea that different
languages and cultures might want to include different topics in their
encyclopedias. But what happens when we share a language but not a
culture? Is there a point where Makmende is sufficiently important to
English-speaking Kenyans that he merits a Wikipedia page even if most
English-speakers couldn’t care less? Or is there an implicit assumption
that an English-language Wikipedia is designed to enshrine landmarks of
shared historical and cultural importance to people who share a
language? <em> </em></p></blockquote>
<p>Interestingly, Makmende does not exist in the Swahili version of
Wikipedia, and the battle to put Makmende on Wikipedia came just two
months after Kenyans were being incentivized by Google to create Swahili
Wikipedia pages. There seems to be a disconnect between where ordinary
Kenyans want their cultural narratives to live, and where outsiders
imagine it.</p>
<p>This story doesn’t only represent a clash between the inclusionists
and deletionists in Wikipedia. It also reflects key issues about the
relationship between different Wikipedias in countries where English
dominates as the written language; about the motivations of Wikipedians
on the edges of the Wikipedia network; and about tensions between
existing policies, the goal of the encyclopaedia and the realities of
historical knowledge in the developing world.</p>
<p><strong>Background: Wikipedia growth is slowing </strong></p>
<p>In August of 2006, Diego Torquemada drew a statistical model that
predicted the future growth of English Wikipedia to reach 6 million
articles by the end of 2008. This model was based on the premise that
more content leads to more traffic which leads to more edits which
generates more content on the encyclopaedia. Wikipedia had enjoyed
exponential growth until that point, with the number of articles
doubling annually from 2002 to 2006.</p>
<p>Torquemada could not know that Wikipedia growth had reached its peak
in 2006 when he developed his model. At a rate of 60,000 articles per
month in mid-2006, the number of new articles would start to follow a
downward trend reaching the point of around 35,000 new articles per
month by the end of 2009. The number of edits similarly reached a peak
in 2007 with 6 million edits and active editors at 800,000. At the end
of 2009, the number of edits had levelled out to about 5.5 million and
active editors were down to around 700,000.</p>
<p>The slowing growth of Wikipedia has been the subject of a number of
news articles, as Internet commentators predict the slow demise of
Wikipedia, and Wikipedians fight back, saying that they are merely
“consolidating”.</p>
<p>In trying to understand the slowing growth of Wikipedia, researchers
at Palo Alto Research Center took a closer look at the data and
interpreted an ecological model to explain the slowing growth. Suh,
Convertino, Chi and Pirolli likened the stagnation to a Darwinian
‘struggle for existence’ in the encyclopaedia, noting that ‘as
populations hit the limits of the ecology, advantages go to members of
the population that have competitive dominance over others’.</p>
<p>Suh et al argued that the ‘resource limitations’ can be likened to
limited opportunities to make novel contributions and that the
consequences of these increasing limitations will manifest itself in
increased patterns of conflict and dominance. Wikipedians, it seemed,
had covered all the “easy” articles and now had “nothing left to talk
about”.</p>
<p><strong>Nothing left to talk about? </strong></p>
<p>Is Wikipedia really ‘running out of things to talk about’? Suh et al
suggested that the number of Wikipedia articles could increase due to
the growth of new knowledge as a result of new scientific studies and
new events but that the size of the encyclopaedia was still levelling
out.</p>
<p>Others like geographer, Mark Graham deride claims that Wikipedia is
‘running out things to write about’ for other reasons. Mapping the
presence of geotags on Wikipedia, Graham found that there are still
‘whole continents that remain a virtual “terra incognita”’ on Wikipedia
and that if these places were given the same detailed treatment as
places in Western Europe and North America, then Wikipedia is only just
getting started.</p>
<p><strong>New Wikipedians as the developing world comes online?</strong></p>
<p>Graham suggests that, ‘It may be that when broadband reaches more
parts of Africa – helped by the landfall of superfast cables in August –
that more people there will start discovering Wikipedia, and that the
site will see a second explosion of new editors and articles about
places that have so far been ignored’.</p>
<p>But it is doubtful whether Internet access alone will make people in
developing countries contribute to Wikipedia. In his study of twelve
different Wikipedia language versions, Morten Rask found that although
‘there is a linear relation between the level of internet penetration
and reach of the Wikipedia network, there is a stronger linear
relationship between the level of human development and internet
penetration’.</p>
<p>Rask used the United Nations Development Programme’s Human
Development Index in his study as a comparative measure of life
expectancy, literacy, education, and standard of living for countries
worldwide. He was interested in finding out whether Wikipedia was only
for ‘rich countries’ in order to understand ‘who is open to work
together in the sharing of knowledge’.</p>
<p>Rask’s findings contradict the so-called ‘techno utopians’ who have
claimed that the mere existence of either the Internet or information
and communications technology have the ability to lift developing
countries out of poverty. Techno utopians include commentators like Don
Tapscott who coined the phrase <em>wikinomics</em> to describe ‘deep
changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and our
economy, based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering,
sharing, and acting globally’.</p>
<p>Tapscott believes that we are living through a ‘participation
revolution (that) opens up new possibilities for billions of people to
play active roles in their workplaces, communities, national
democracies, and the global economy at large. This has profound social
benefits, including the opportunity to make governments more accountable
and lift millions of people out of poverty’.</p>
<p>Access to Wikipedia’s ‘revolutionary’ potential is an extension of
this techno utopian vision. Investigating the ‘reach and richness’ of
Wikipedia, Rask provides a solid critique of statements like Tapscott’s
that ‘all one needs is a computer, a network connection, and a bright
spark of initiative and creativity to join in the economy’ by showing
that ‘Internet penetration is not the only complete and sufficient
variable’ for development. Analysing data from twelve Wikipedia language
versions, and mapping it to variables such as the country’s Human
Development Index and broadband penetration, Rask was able to show that
human development variables were much more critical to participation in
Wikipedia than broadband access.</p>
<p><strong>Internal limitations</strong></p>
<p>Apart from the external limitations of human development and
broadband penetration, Wikipedians on the edges of the network also face
a number of internal challenges that reflect a growing resistance
within Wikipedia to new content. As those from developing countries come
online and try to edit the encyclopedia, a number of conflicts have
arisen due to tensions between so-called ‘inclusionists’ and
‘deletionists’ in the encyclopaedia.</p>
<p>‘Inclusionists’ are Wikipedians who would rather see more articles –
even if they are short and/or poorly written, while ‘deletionists’ are
concerned with quality, believing that it is more important to have
less, good quality articles than more poorly written articles with
questionable notability.</p>
<p>In an article entitled, ‘The battle for Wikipedia’s soul’, The
Economist writes: ‘The behaviour of Wikipedia’s self-appointed
deletionist guardians, who excise anything that does not meet their
standards, justifying their actions with a blizzard of acronyms, is now
known as “wiki-lawyering”’.</p>
<p>The Palo Alto Research Center group suggested that the ‘deletionists
might have won’ when they found that the number of reverted edits has
increased steadily, and that occasional editors experience a visibly
greater resistance compared to high-frequency editors.</p>
<p>According to Suh et al., ‘Since 2003, edits from occasional editors
have been reverted (at) a higher rate than edits from prolific editors.
Furthermore, this disparity of treatment of new edits from editors of
different classes has been widening steadily over the years at the
expense of low-frequency editors. We consider this as evidence of
growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content,
especially when the edits come from occasional editors’.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>Public goods and the costs of contribution</strong></p>
<p>If Wikipedia is available in Swahili, and the effort required to
start a Swahili page is lower than on the English version, why was the
Kenyan community so determined that the Makmende article exist on the
English version of Wikipedia?</p>
<p>Clues to the answer can be found in debates about public goods.
Wikipedia can be considered to be a public good since it is
non-rivalrous (one person’s use of Wikipedia doesn’t deplete another
person’s use of it) and non-excludable (no one can be effectively
excluded from using Wikipedia, if they’re online at least). Peter
Kollock, writing in the late 90s about public goods and how their value
shifts when it is placed online, declared that all online community
interaction creates public goods and that this is a remarkable property
of online interaction and unprecedented in the history of human society.</p>
<p>Unprecedented as it is, people still need to be motivated to
contribute to public goods. The question with regard to the Makmende
case is: If people will create public goods when motivations are higher
than costs of contributing, what are the relative costs for contributing
to English vs Swahili Wikipedia?</p>
<p>It is clear from the Makmende example that Wikipedia newbies must
navigate a growing bureaucracy and complicated policies when dealing
with English Wikipedians, many of whom would rather not have to deal
with any more articles to improve. This creates a high barrier to entry
that must be offset by higher motivational factors in order to
incentivise volunteer activity.</p>
<p>If the costs of contribution in terms of centralised control,
bureaucracy and the lack of ‘reliable’ sources are higher in the English
Wikipedia, then motivations for contributing must have been
significantly higher for Kenyans when contributing Makmende to the
English version.</p>
<p>In his paper on ‘The Economies of Online Cooperation’ Kollock notes
four motivations for providing public goods including anticipated
reciprocity, reputation, sense of efficacy and need.</p>
<p><strong>Reciprocity</strong></p>
<p>According to Kollock, ‘a person is motivated to contribute valuable
information to the group in the expectation that one will receive useful
help and information in return that is, the motivation is an
anticipated reciprocity’.</p>
<p>The promise of reciprocity on the English Wikipedia is relatively
high based on the scale of contribution. Even though contributors
account for less than 1% of users, the scale of the encyclopaedia means
that the numbers of active contributors is about 40,000 active editors
for 26 per million speakers versus Swahili Wikipedia with 0.4 editors
per million speakers (about 20 active editors). According to Phares
Kariuki, he created the Makmende page because there are few
opportunities to create a Wikipedia entry that would be populated
quickly. Kariuki said that he isn’t a regular Wikipedia contributor and
that the last time he contributed was many years ago. He points to the
small numbers who care enough to promote the page as a problem. “If I
started a page on my high school it would take six years to build up.”
Kariuki had tried to edit before but didn’t have much success. “I am a
heavy user like most of us here in Nairobi but there’s never really been
motivation to become an editor before,” he said.</p>
<p>Wikipedians on the English Wikipedia are relatively assured that
others will continue to contribute, whereas contributors to smaller
Wikipedias must understand that numbers of editors are few and that
Wikipedia may shut down Wikipedias where growth has stagnated and where
they have become overrun by spam.</p>
<p>Interestingly, Eric Goldman’s claim that ‘Wikipedia will fail in 5
years’ because of increasing spam has been more prophetic for smaller
Wikipedias than the English Wikipedia. According to Goldman, ‘free
editability’ (allowing anyone to edit) is Wikipedia’s Achilles’ heel.
The sheer scale of the English Wikipedia has won out against spammers in
English Wikipedia, but smaller Wikipedias must face a continual battle –
especially when their numbers are so small in comparison to the
spammers.</p>
<p><strong>Reputation</strong></p>
<p>Kollock noted that the effect of contributions on one’s reputation is
another possible motivation. ‘High quality information, impressive
technical details in one’s answers, a willingness to help others, and
elegant writing can al work to increase one’s prestige in the
community,’ he found.</p>
<p>It is interesting to note that the reputation motivation requires
that there are people to impress in the community. Because of the small
scale of Swahili Wikipedia, for example, the fact that one can gain
prestige from the group might not necessarily be positive if the real
power lies outside the group. The English version of Wikipedia receives 9
million views per hour, whereas the Swahili version gets 1,700 with the
effect that one’s reputation is much more highly valued on the English
version of Wikipedia.</p>
<p>In addition, the content of the article is noteworthy. A description
of Kenya’s first Internet meme, it can be seen as Kenya’s unique
contribution to the global phenomenon of Internet memes. This wasn’t an
article about the British parliamentary system or the life cycle of bees
– it was an article that positioned itself in the global framework of
Internet memes. ‘Look, world,’ Kenyans seemed to be saying, ‘You have
your Internet memes. Now we do too!’</p>
<p>If one looks at this through the information sharing lens, one can
make a parallel with the fact that people are more likely to contribute
expertise rather than organisational knowledge because of its unique
character and because it shows something of their unique nature. Kenyans
were sharing this information specifically on the English Wikipedia
because it was unique in the global sense and because they were about to
contribute their expertise on a subject that they had direct experience
with for the first time.</p>
<p><strong>Sense of efficacy</strong></p>
<p>The third possible motivation proposed by Kollock is the sense that a
person contributes valuable information because the act results in a
sense of efficacy, that is, ‘a sense that she has some effect on this
environment’.</p>
<p>Certainly, those editing Swahili Wikipedia must have a much larger
sense that they are affecting change in the environment since their
edits are much more likely to be accepted, and they are more likely able
to develop policies and rules in the emerging Wikipedia. Contrast this
with the fact that new content on English Wikipedia will most likely be
reverted and one recognises how one’s sense of efficacy on the
environment is affected by Wikipedia’s growing isolation from new
editors.</p>
<p>From another perspective, however, it can be said that the sense of
efficacy would be so much greater on the English Wikipedia since the
content of the article is so unique and would have an important impact
in diversifying the range of material on the English Wikipedia. In this
sense, even if the costs of contributing to English Wikipedia are
higher, and even if it is much more difficult to have an effect on the
environment, the resulting efficacy is large because it is a unique
contribution.</p>
<p><strong>Need</strong></p>
<p>According to Kollock, the fourth motivation is altruistic in the
sense that individuals value the outcomes of others. ‘One may produce
and contribute a public good for the simple reason that a person or the
group as a whole has a need for it,’ he says. Here, there may be a stark
difference between the need for Swahili language content on Wikipedia
as perceived by the international community and the need within Kenya.</p>
<p>Kenya’s official languages are Swahili and English, with most Kenyans
being trilingual, speaking their tribal language as well as Swahili and
English. English is the lingua franca of the global business community
and arguably that of the Internet.</p>
<p>Despite 50 million speakers, the Swahili Wikipedia has only about
17,000 articles and 400,000 editors, and Swahili is considered more of a
spoken language than a written language. Thus, Kenyans may not regard
the need to develop a Swahili encyclopaedia as high when they are trying
to improve their English in order to become more established in global
business.</p>
<p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p>
<p>Unhindered by long print publication schedules, Wikipedia is able to
reflect events and incidents as soon as they happen, rather than
recording only those that a smaller group of experts decide is important
enough. As broadband access grows in large parts of Africa and Asia,
Wikipedia could expand to include a massive new corpus of previously
unrecognized viewpoints.</p>
<p>Recent studies have shown how power within Wikipedia is consolidating
and that attempts to broaden the scope of the encyclopaedia are often
met with aggressive deletionism. Wikipedia is said to be ‘revolutionary’
because it is written by ‘ordinary people’ rather than ‘experts’, but
whether experts or ordinary people, Wikipedia still reflects the
perspective of a small, homogenous, geographically close community.</p>
<p>Although the costs of contributing to smaller Wikipedias are arguably
lower, people in developing countries like Kenya see the English
Wikipedia as the relevant venue for articles that show Kenya’s unique
contribution to global phenomena. The motivations for contributing in
English Wikipedia are therefore much greater than contributing to the
Swahili version, but it is unlikely that the vast holes in geographical
and cultural content will be filled when the costs of contribution are
so large.</p>
<p>My conclusion is that, far from having nothing left to talk about,
Wikipedia has a number of holes, but that the homophily of the current
network is coming up against its need to expand and diversify. Without a
strategy for dealing with local notability, Wikipedia will continue to
battle to overcome its impediments to growth and will ultimately fail to
realise more diverse, global participation.</p>
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<p><a href="http://hblog.org/writing/the-missing-wikipedians/#_ftnref2" target="_blank">[2]</a> This was the headline of a blog post by Ethan Zuckerman <a href="http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/03/24/makmendes-so-huge-he-cant-fit-in-wikipedia/" target="_blank">http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/03/24/makmendes-so-huge-he-cant-fit-in-wikipedia/</a></p>
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</div><br clear="all"><font color="#888888">-- <br>"Discordo daquilo que dizes, mas defenderei até a morte o teu direito de o dizeres". - Voltaire<br>
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