I was describing to someone how Wikipedia works:
"anyone can edit" etc.
He answered with this argument:
"Wikipedia is the triumph of the average person!
of the man in the street!)"
(average meaning: not good, not bad, just OK)
I asked "why?"
His explanation:
"Great brilliant works are built by individuals.
Groups of people can only create average works.
If someone writes something good in the wiki,
other average persons will intervene with his/her
work and turn it into an average work. If someone
writes something bad in the wiki, the others will
again turn it into something of average value.
with your system (meaning: Wikipedia's system)
you can be sure that you will never create
something too bad but also never something too
good. You can create only average articles."
The idea behind his argument was that Wikipedia
will be a good resource as long as it attracts
good cotnributors. but it will soon become an
average site/encyclopaedia because it allows
anyone to join the project and edit, and most
people are just average persons and not brilliant
writers.
Do you think it's true? and how can we answer
this argument?
--Optim
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
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On Sunday 28 July 2002 03:00 am, The Cunctator wrote:
> What are the articles this person has been changing?
For 66.108.155.126:
20:08 Jul 27, 2002 Computer
20:07 Jul 27, 2002 Exploit
20:07 Jul 27, 2002 AOL
20:05 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
20:05 Jul 27, 2002 Leet
20:03 Jul 27, 2002 Root
20:02 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:59 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:58 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:54 Jul 27, 2002 Principle of least astonishment
19:54 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
19:52 Jul 27, 2002 Trance music
19:51 Jul 27, 2002 Trance music
For 208.24.115.6:
20:20 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
For 141.157.232.26:
20:19 Jul 27, 2002 Hacker
Most of these were complete replacements with discoherent statements.
Such as "TAP IS THE ABSOLUTE DEFINITION OF THE NOUN HACKER" for Hacker.
For the specifics follow http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Special:Ipblocklist
and look at the contribs.
--mav
Dear all,
Most of you would be aware of some of the discussions that have occurred
around Wikipedia in the Norwegian languages. Since the last round of
discussions on this list, there has been a lot of internal debate, as
well as what seems to be a fairly widely accepted agreement following
voting.
This e-mail intends to, after a brief recap on Norwegian language and
wikipedia issues, take those interested through the latest development
and will stake out the road ahead. It is also intended to inform the
international community about the current agreement on no.wikipedia, so
as to prevent misunderstandings in the future.
Finally, we will mention an unfortunate reaction to the vote by a small
number of users at the Norwegian Bokmål/Riksmål (no:) wikipedia who want
to disregard the result of the voting and are planning to create a
_third_ Norwegian wikipedia with the sole mission of mixing the contents
of the two current Norwegian versions.
== A short language history of Norway ==
Spoken Norwegian ("norsk") (ISO 639-2 alpha-2 code "no") is in a fairly
unique situation compared to most other languages of the world in that
it has two widely accepted written standards, Bokmål (ISO 639-2 alpha-2
code "nb") and Nynorsk (ISO 639-2 alpha-2 code "nn"). By national
legislation they are both regarded as official written forms of
Norwegian. In addition, many people still make a distinction between
Bokmål and its precursor which still is in use, Riksmål.
Briefly speaking, Bokmål and Riksmål are descendants of the Danish
written language. Until the 1800s, Danish was the only widely used
written language in Norway as a result of four centuries of union with
Denmark. With increasing independence came a wish to norwegianise the
Danish standard, with Knud Knudsen at the forefront for changing parts
of the vocabulary and orthographics. Thus, Riksmål, and later Bokmål,
resulted. These forms together are today probably used by about 90% of
Norway's population, or somewhere around 3,500,000 people.
Parallel to this development, a new written standard was created by Ivar
Aasen. He travelled extensively throughout Norway, and based his new
language, landsmål, on the grammar and vocabulary of dialect samples
from around the country. This was later renamed Nynorsk. Modern Nynorsk
differs significantly from modern Bokmål, and may be linguistically
looked upon as as different (or as similar if you like) as Swedish is to
Danish. For English or Dutch/German speakers, the differences may be
likened to those between (Lowland) Scots and English or Low German and
Dutch. Today it is estimated that about 500,000-600,000 people have
Nynorsk as their first written language.
More information about the Norwegian language history can be found in
English, German, French, Spanish or Portuguese on the website of the
Norwegian Language Council:
http://www.sprakrad.no/templates/Page.aspx?id=653
== A short history of Wikipedia in Norwegian ==
The first Norwegian wikipedia started 26 November 2001 on the subdomain
no.wikipedia.org. As most wikipedias, its contributor and article count
started really picking up around the end of 2003. At the time, it
accepted all written standards of Norwegian, although the amount of
Nynorsk was minimal. There were already several debates about the
feasibilty and appropriateness of keeping the two languages united on
one Wikipedia. On 31 July 2004 a Wikipedia for Nynorsk was created.
The creation of nn:, however, split the community at no: wikipedia. Many
felt that given that Nynorsk now had its own wikipedia, no: should
become a Bokmål/Riksmål Wikipedia only. Others disapproved and claimed
that there was no need to change and that it should continue its
language policy of accepting all and keep its interwiki link name of
"Norsk".
Nynorsk Wikipedia soon proved a success, as it within the next few
months gathered several people who had felt uncomfortable in the
(mainly) Bokmål environment at no:. The name displayed in interwiki
links became "Norsk (nynorsk)" (languages are not spelt with upper case
in Norwegian). To date it continues to be one of the fastest growing
wikipedias, with a steady article increase, now at over 6000 articles
and >50 editors with more than 10 edits since arrival.
== Votes ==
The issue of no:'s language policy has come up time and again, and a
vote was held in March ([[:no:Wikipedia:Målform]]) as to which policy to
adapt. Independent of the method of the tally (whether or not to include
new contributors etc.) there was a majority for switching to a
Bokmål/Riksmål only language policy (50% for Bokmål/Riksmål, 43.2% for
Bokmål/Riksmål/Nynorsk/Høgnorsk, and 6.8% for the official variants
Bokmål/Nynorsk only).
Following this result, there is now going to be a vote on which
interwiki link name will most appropriately reflect the current language
policy of no:. The result of this vote will most likely be either "Norsk
(bokmål)" or "Norsk (bokmål/riksmål)".
Understandably, there has also been a debate as to whether the subdomain
should change from "no" to "nb", as this is the correct representation
of Bokmål according to ISO 639-2. However, there is some resentment
towards such a move and currently a general acceptance in letting the
Bokmål wikipedia stay at "no". The alternative some have suggested is a
server-side redirect from "no" to "nb", in the same way that "nb" today
is a server-side redirect to the equivalent page on "no".
== Summary of the problem ==
Unfortunately, a small group of users (who all write Bokmål/Riksmål) are
ignoring the results from the vote, and are claiming they want to
re-establish a wikipedia for all written standards of Norwegian. They
claim they have been in touch with people centrally in Wikimedia
(developers? stewards?) and that they have so far received positive
comments. With this email, we would like to state the fact that there
have been no official decisions about creating a third Norwegian
wikipedia containing both Bokmål and Nynorsk, it is merely an unofficial
initiative from a small group of users which started a sign-on list at
[[:no:Bruker:Norsk_Wikipedia]]. A spontaneous list with signatures
against this activity was immediately created at
[[:no:Wikipedia-diskusjon:Fellesnorsk]]. The process of creating a third
Norwegian wikipedia has not gone through a voting process in any of the
two existing Norwegian wikipedias (no: and nn:) and can not be
considered as a decision by the Norwegian Wikipedia community.
We believe the creation of a third wikipedia under the Wikimedia
foundation would have a serious and unfortunate impact on the existing
wikipedias in Norwegian, no: and nn:, and would undermine Wikipedia's
reputation in Norway. This being said, we are all for extensive co-
operation between the four Scandinavian language wikipedias (including
Swedish and Danish), as evident by the recent creation of
[[:meta:Skanwiki]], the Scandinavian meta-pages, and the use of featured
articles from neighbour wikipedias.
== Conclusion ==
Hopefully, this letter will help people better understand the
complicated language situation of the Norwegian Wikipedia community, so
as to give a background on which discussion can take place on this list
in the future, such as the inevitable debate following a possible
request for a re-establishment of the common (and third!) Norwegian
Wikipedia.
>From the community of no.wikipedia.org and nn.wikipedia.org,
Bjarte Sørensen [[:meta:User:BjarteSorensen]] (Administrator/bureaucrat on nn:)
Lars Alvik [[:no:User:Profoss]] (Administrator/bureaucrat on no:)
Øyvind A. Holm [[:no:User:Sunny256]] (Administrator on no:)
Onar Vikingstad [[:no:User:Vikingstad]] (Administrator on no:)
Jon Harald Søby [[:no:User:Jhs]] (Administrator on no:)
Chris Nyborg [[:no:User:Cnyborg]] (Administrator on no:)
Guttorm Flatabø [[:no:User:Dittaeva]] (Administrator on nn:)
Gunleiv Hadland [[:meta:User:Gunnernett]] (Administrator on nn:)
Jarle Fagerheim [[:nn:User:Jarle]] (Administrator on nn:)
Øyvind Jo Heimdal Eik [[:en:User:Pladask]] (Administrator on nn: and no:)
Kristian André Gallis [[:nn:User:Kristaga]]
Vegard Wærp [[:no:User:Vegardw]]
Nina Aldin Thune [[:no:User:Nina]]
Thor-Rune Hansen [[:no:User:ThorRune]]
Claes Tande [[:no:User:Ctande]]
Arnt-Erik Krokaa [[:no:User:AEK]]
Rune Sattler [[:no:User:Shauni]]
[Apologies for cross-posting; this same e-mail is being sent to wikipedia-l, WikiEN-l and foundation-l]
Hi everyone,
We are a research group conducting a systematic literature review on Wikipedia-related peer-reviewed academic studies published in the English language. (Although there are many excellent studies in other languages, we unfortunately do not have the resources to systematically review these at any kind of acceptable scholarly level. Also, our study is about Wikipedia only, not about other Wikimedia Foundation projects. However, we do include studies about other language Wikipedias, as long as the studies are published in English.) We have completed a search using many major databases of scholarly research. We've posted separate messages to wiki-research-l related to this literature review.
We have identified over 2,100 peer-reviewed studies that have "wikipedia", "wikipedian", or "wikipedians" in their title, abstract or keywords. As this number of studies is far too large for conducting a review synthesis, we have decided to focus only on peer-reviewed journal publications and doctoral theses; we identified 638 such studies. In addition, we identified around 1,500 peer-reviewed conference articles.
We hope that our review would provide useful insights for both wikipedians and researchers. (Although we know that most Wikipedia researchers are also wikipedians, we define wikipedian or "Wikipedia practitioner" here as someone involved in the Wikipedia project who is not also a scholarly researcher.) In particular, here is a list of some of the research questions we are investigating in our review that are particularly pertinent to wikipedians (you can check wiki-research-l for the full set of research questions):
1. What high-quality research has been conducted with Wikipedia as a major topic or data source? As mentioned in the introductory e-mail, we have already identified over 2,100 studies, though we will only analyze 638 of them in depth. We will group the articles by field of study.
2. What research questions have been asked by various sources, both academic scholarly and practitioner? We want to know both the subjects that the existing research has covered, and also catalogue key questions that practitioners would like to be answered, whether or not academic research has broached these questions. Also, we categorize the research questions based on their purposes.
6. What conclusions have been made from existing research? That is, what questions from RQ2 have been answered, and what are these answers?
7. What questions from RQ2 are left unanswered? (These present directions for future research.)
Regarding our RQ2, on the research questions that have been asked, we want to identify not only the research questions that we extract from the articles, but also what questions are of interest that have not been studied. For this, we have identified a few banks of Wikipedia-related research questions.
We are most of all interested in questions that wikipedians are asking, other than what researchers are asking. There is an old list of research questions or goals at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Research_Goals; these questions are about Wikimedia Foundation projects in general, though Wikipedia is of course included. Could you please review this list and update that page directly with any additional questions? Alternately, you could reply us directly, and we could update the list.
Another bank of questions we have identified is more directed towards academics and researchers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikidemia#Research_Quest…. We have asked the wiki-research-l subscribers to update that list. We will draw from both lists for our bank of research questions.
Thanks for your help.
Chitu Okoli, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
(http://chitu.okoli.org/professional/open-content/wikipedia-and-open-content…)
Arto Lanamäki, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway
Mohamad Mehdi, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
Mostafa Mesgari, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
Top 50 viewed articles per hour, now aggregated and browsable:
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/toptopics.php
Currently en.wp and de.wp only. Backfilled 5 days. Will be updated
every hour automatically from now on. API coming soon-ish.
Cheers,
Magnus
Another 400 free Credo Reference accounts have been made available for
Wikipedians, kindly donated by the company and arranged by Erik Möller
of the Wikimedia Foundation. We've drawn up some eligibility criteria
to direct the accounts to content contributors, and after that it's
first come, first served. The list will open on Wednesday, March 23 at
22:00 UTC, and will remain open for seven days. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CREDO
Feel free to add your name even if you're lower on the list than the
400th, in case people ahead of you aren't eligible.
Good luck!
Sarah
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SlimVirgin
Hello all! Just launched a new wiki and would love to get your input. Einstein University is a free online university/academic social network where students and professors from around the world can share ideas, read each others papers and collaborate on research. You can upload your photo, curriculum vitae and up to four research papers. Instead of charging students tuition the university funds itself through ad revenue and uses volunteer professors. Our focus is solely on higher education and our goal is to become a fully accredited degree granting university. With your help we can give the 2.5 billion people that live off less than $2 a day a chance at a higher education for the first time. Check us out at www.einstein-university.org
"It's the oldest temptation. Not gold or the power it can buy, not love, not
even the deep, drumming fires of lust: What we coveted first was knowledge."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Lee_Carrell
"Haunt Me Still"
Chapter 1
Line 1
Sorry for the long posting; Bob is right, we're essentially asking you to please updatehttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Research_Goals
with any additional research questions you might be interested in, or send us the questions directly for us to add. I should have put the request at the top of the message, and then left the rest as general background at the bottom.
Thanks,
Chitu
On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 8:12 AM, Bob the Wikipedian<
bobthewikipedian at gmail.com <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l>> wrote:
>/ I read it several times before figuring out (maybe?) that this is a
/>/ request that update the list of questions at [[WP:WD]]. That page looks
/>/ rather...well, "outdated" is an understatement...
/>/
/>/ However, it would seem to me that a researcher would generate questions
/>/ to research by looking at the discussion sections of recent papers on
/>/ the topic of Wikipedia. Usually in the discussion section, the author
/>/ mentions something like "more research needs to be done on /x/ /topic/."
/>/
/>/ God bless,
/>/ Bob/
Message: 7
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2011 14:40:38 -0400
From: Chitu Okoli<Chitu.Okoli(a)concordia.ca>
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Request for feedback on research questions for
Wikipedia literature review
To:foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org,wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org,
wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Message-ID:<4D7E6126.1020609(a)concordia.ca>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
[Apologies for cross-posting; this same e-mail is being sent to wikipedia-l, WikiEN-l and foundation-l]
Hi everyone,
We are a research group conducting a systematic literature review on Wikipedia-related peer-reviewed academic studies published in the English language. (Although there are many excellent studies in other languages, we unfortunately do not have the resources to systematically review these at any kind of acceptable scholarly level. Also, our study is about Wikipedia only, not about other Wikimedia Foundation projects. However, we do include studies about other language Wikipedias, as long as the studies are published in English.) We have completed a search using many major databases of scholarly research. We've posted separate messages to wiki-research-l related to this literature review.
We are most of all interested in questions that wikipedians are asking, other than what researchers are asking. There is an old list of research questions or goals athttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Research_Goals; these questions are about Wikimedia Foundation projects in general, though Wikipedia is of course included. Could you please review this list and update that page directly with any additional questions? Alternately, you could reply us directly, and we could update the list.
Thanks for your help.
Chitu Okoli, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
(http://chitu.okoli.org/professional/open-content/wikipedia-and-open-content…)
Arto Lanam?ki, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway
Mohamad Mehdi, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
Mostafa Mesgari, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
------------------------------