Good day
More than one member of this mailing list has responded to my first posting here. I am grateful for many helpful comments.
I feel I must clarify my comments on Mr. Lih's book The Wikipedia Revolution. Admittedly I wrote the post a bit tired and impatient, although it is a not an excuse, it is an explanation. To be sure I find it to be very insightful and informative. Mr. Lih has a good oversight while also portraying an original historical perspective in linking the Open Source movement (RMS, Linux, etc.) to the later Wikipedia society.
The key word in my earlier expression is interesting. That being said I was and am hungry for more and that is what I meant by "incomplete", my hunger isn't sated. The one thing that did disappoint me really about the book was it's carelessness with citing sources. I find little coherence in when he cites sources, and when he does there is more often than not just a single URL. This is something that should only take a couple of days work to fix, maybe his publisher, Hyperion, is at fault. I was in no way charachterizing Mr. Lih's work as "sloppy", far from it. I applaud it.
As to how I aim to write a history of the Icelandic Wikipedia, well there is a lot of data available ;) With the author's permission, I intend to WikiDAT to quantitatively analyse the Icelandic wikidumps. In many respects the Icelandic Wikipedia is very "research friendly". It is small, about 35k articles and has an active user base of less than 50. So the number crunching isn't really that demanding. Icelanders are in general highly educated and very computer literate, high proportion (90%) uses the Internet on a daily basis/high speed connections are very common. So a fairly high proportion uses Wikipedia (but probably less the Icelandic one, I often here complaints that it is inferior). It is not improbable that a fairly high proportion of the most active users would be willing to grant an interview. So I hope to approach the subject from all sides so to speak.
Best regards, Hrafn
On Wed, 05 Sep 2012 11:37:03 +0000, Hrafn H Malmquist hhm1@hi.is wrote:
Good day everyone
My name is Hrafn Malmquist, I am an Icelandic student of library and information science at the University of Iceland, writing a master's
thesis
on the Icelandic Wikipedia (http://is.wikipedia.org) which I have personally actively contributed to for about six years (http://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notandi:Jabbi). It has currently 34,478 articles and a very active user base of probably less than 30 users. My approach is wholistic, recounting the general history of Wikipedia, the Icelandic Wikipedia, the statistical development and possibly conduct interviews with contributing users.
Any pointers on interesting research - especially with regard to small language communities - would be well appriciated.
In searching for sources on the general history of Wikipedia, the best overview I found is Andrew Lih's The Wikipedia Revolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Revolution). I find it to be interesting but incomplete and rather sloppy when it comes to citing sources. He should have finished it off with more care. Does anyone know
of
a better alternative?
Best regards, Hrafn
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