On 14 March 2010 13:48, David Gerard dgerard@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)