On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 11:02 AM, Cormac Lawler cormaggio@gmail.com wrote:
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I think what's interesting here is asking: how does Wikipedia harness the energy of the public (for want of a better word) in a way that can be more productive, useful (or at least less brain-sporkingly nonsensical) than a newspaper open comment section does? What is it about this way of working - this mode of production - that works well? And what is afforded by 'open commenting' that the wiki model doesn't? (I don't we should overly idealise the wiki model - I'm sure we've all sporked our brains out over on-wiki affairs at some stage or another.)
I was reading a newspaper on a ferry journey today (the newspaper being 'The Guardian') and the Wikipedia model of editing was mentioned in relation to a project involving "crowd-sourcing" an analysis of the expenses of British MPs (there is a current scandal about this). Let me see if I can find it online anywhere.
Here we go, the project itself:
http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/
Lots of reporting of the project here:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=guardian+crowd+sourcing+expenses
It's certainly an interesting way of harnessing the energy of the public.
The Guardian article I read was titled "A crowd gathers as MPs' money proves surprise web hit". Issue was 22nd June 2009. Bottom of the front page. The article is online here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/21/mps-expenses-crowd-sourcing-d...
The mention of Wikipedia was as follows:
"[the Guardian's project] provides something of a riposte to one Telegraph commentator who dismissed the idea that a "collective of Kool-Aid slurping Wikipedians" could conduct "rigorous analysis necessary for the recent MPs' expenses investigation"."
So not overly complimentary, but interesting. If anyone could find the Telegraph article that is being quoted, that would be good. The closet I got was this:
http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/2009/06/03/telegraph-journos-with-huge-chips...
...which is an interesting blog in its own right.
In this article:
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/06/19/236524/guardian-exposes-mp...
I read that the project involves: "a Django application running on Amazon EC2".
Could someone technically minded explain how that differs from a wiki?
Carcharoth