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(a)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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