Hi!
I am a) writing a student research paper and b) going to have a lecture on a german linux-congress about Wikipedia. Has there anybody done this before? I know the lecture of Kurt Janson last year on 19C3 in Berlin but is there no newer stuff? Well I know what to write and talk but I am just wondering why there are so little (=practically no) scientific publications or conference papers (=everything but simple newspaper articles) on Wikipedia yet. On the other hand I don´t mind if I am the first one ;-)
The only references I found (up to now):
http://wiki.wizards-of-os.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Wikipedia_And_Friends
Thanks a lot Jakob Voss / nichtich
Oh, I found
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tomos
that´s what I was searching for. I moved the part to a page of it´s one.
Greetings, Jakob
jakob.voss-
Hi!
I am a) writing a student research paper and b) going to have a lecture on a german linux-congress about Wikipedia. Has there anybody done this before? I know the lecture of Kurt Janson last year on 19C3 in Berlin but is there no newer stuff? Well I know what to write and talk but I am just wondering why there are so little (=practically no) scientific publications or conference papers (=everything but simple newspaper articles) on Wikipedia yet. On the other hand I don?t mind if I am the first one ;-)
Wikipedia is less than 3 years old. Many people still don't take us seriously, and most academics are relatively clueless with regard to the Internet, i.e. they know how to find stuff, but they aren't usually familiar with the communities. Give it time -- sooner or later, most of them will discover Wikipedia by pure chance.
Jimbo and I are going to talk about the project at the Wizards of OS conference next year, and I think I'm the only one in Germany to have done any in depth reporting on the project. It's not in a peer reviewed journal, but probably more thorough than anything you are going to find in the journals for some time to come:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/fr-30.05.03-000/
When I talk about Wikipedia at conferences, once thing I like to do is to just show people some articles, even using the "random page" function to give people an impression how the quality is and what kind of material we have. When people think "encyclopedia", they usually don't think of a reference work that has everything from comprehensive Harry Potter summaries to in depth articles about Irisih politics.
At the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart I did a direct comparison with Britannica on some key subjects, and Wikipedia clearly came out on top in many areas. If you're going to do a comprehensive paper, that's the direction I would pursue.
Regards,
Erik
erik_moeller@gmx.de (Erik Moeller) writes:
At the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart I did a direct comparison with Britannica on some key subjects, and Wikipedia clearly came out on top in many areas.
Maybe that's valid for the english version. Concerning the German version we are facing many a lot gaps and semi-info.
If you're going to do a comprehensive paper, that's the direction I would pursue.
Please talk about the problematic areas, too. Often (I'm talking about the German version) articles are just listings and another problem is, that many a lot home land lovers (Heimatliebhaber) are active - thus most of the time you will read only good things within their articles and worse, they don'e hesitate to manipulate history.
Articles like "Böhmen" are always in danger.
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
Please talk about the problematic areas, too. Often (I'm talking about the German version) articles are just listings and another problem is, that many a lot home land lovers (Heimatliebhaber) are active - thus most of the time you will read only good things within their articles and worse, they don'e hesitate to manipulate history.
This sort of tangentially raises an issue that's been in the back of my mind for a while: to what extent can the non-English Wikipedias be expected to reach the same levels of NPOV as the English one? For a few other widely spoken languages, including most likely German, and perhaps a few others, it may be achievable (so my point isn't directly related to yours). However, it strikes me as one of the major benefits of the English Wikipedia that its contributors come from dozens of countries and many many backgrounds, and it seems unlikely that some of the lesser-spoken languages will have this advantage. What are the chances, for example, that the Greek Wikipedia (assuming it ever gets off the ground) will have a history of the Greek-Turkish (or Greek-FYROM) conflict with NPOV standards similar to the descriptions of those conflicts in the English Wikipedia? Or, for that matter, what are the chances of those same conflicts being described in a NPOV manner on the Turkish Wikipedia? Or the Serbian Wikipedia's articles on the Kosovo conflict? etc.
On the English Wikipedia, some of the more contentious issues are hammered out in a way that, ideally, will allow all partisans to accept the article as essentially neutral (even if sometimes grudgingly). But on, say, the Turkish Wikipedia, there are unlikely to be many Greek partisans throwing their opinion into the debate, so it seems that an NPOV will converge on a consensus Turkish view: something that could be held as "neutral" by the majority of Turks, but would likely be considered pretty far from neutral by a Greek (and vice versa). This, in my view, would be equivalent to what would happen if there were an English Wikipedia only edited by people from, say, the United States: the NPOV we'd converge on would not be the same (and would be inferior, I'd argue) to the NPOV we currently converge on with an English Wikipedia edited by people from all over the world. But, given that not many people who are not of Turkish background speak Turkish, that seems unlikely to happen there. Similar situations exist for many other languages.
So I guess my question is: do people think it is likely that Wikipedias in languages that are spoken almost exclusively by people of one particular national background can ever hope to achieve anything even remotely resembling the NPOV on the Wikipedias in languages that are spoken by a wide range of people? Is having contributors from a wide range of backgrounds a necessary prerequisite for NPOV (as I suggest)?
-Mark
Delirium-
to what extent can the non-English Wikipedias be expected to reach the same levels of NPOV as the English one?
Two conditions:
1) The project must draw from a reasonably large pool of contributors - no country is homogenous, so you will inevitably find people who hold views different from the mainstream, especially in countries with Internet access (a requirement for working on Wikipedia in the first place).
2) NPOV and Wikiquette must be enforced. If it's possible to push a point of view through simply through persistence and repeated reverting, as is currently the case on the English Wikipedia, then on average, the majority view will prevail.
2) means that every Wikipedia will need mediation and arbitration procedures that are easy to understand, unbiased and effective. NPOV is truly the greatest challenge of all for Wikipedia, no matter in which language.
Regards,
Erik
Hi,
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
This sort of tangentially raises an issue that's been in the back of my mind for a while: to what extent can the non-English Wikipedias be expected to reach the same levels of NPOV as the English one? For a few
Excuse me. I can't agree with that.
Your argumentation assumes that because the contributors of the English WP come from "all over the world", it is more NPOV. On my POV, the English is not more NPOV than others (at least the French one which I know), because the fact is that there are very few contributors from Arab, African and Asian coutries. In fact, most of the contributors come from rich countries and very few from Third World countries.
But that also true for other WP. And that OK as long as you don't pretend that it is perfectly NPOV. It is NPOV for English contributors from rich countries. Not exactly the same. ;o)
Regards, Yann
Yann Forget wrote:
Hi,
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
This sort of tangentially raises an issue that's been in the back of my mind for a while: to what extent can the non-English Wikipedias be expected to reach the same levels of NPOV as the English one?
Excuse me. I can't agree with that.
Your argumentation assumes that because the contributors of the English WP come from "all over the world", it is more NPOV. On my POV, the English is not more NPOV than others (at least the French one which I know), because the fact is that there are very few contributors from Arab, African and Asian coutries. In fact, most of the contributors come from rich countries and very few from Third World countries.
But that also true for other WP. And that OK as long as you don't pretend that it is perfectly NPOV. It is NPOV for English contributors from rich countries. Not exactly the same. ;o)
NPOV is an ideal that we hopefully all strive for. Hopefully each edit gets us closer to it. What Yann says about the French WP is just as true about English. What participation have we had from Ghana, or Guyana, or Kiribati? These are all officially English speaking countries.
Still, the NPOV issue needs to be sorted out and worked out separately for each language. Any attempt to impose it or enforce it may be a violation of Star Trek's prime directive by the English speakers. It's as stupid as sending troops to another country to enforce democracy. The best way to ensure NPOV may be to model it, not just in what we write but in how we respect what others write. The second tool may be by helping when asked to help, and almost only when asked to help.
Neutrality can be a moving target. It changes as the community change. In a language WP with only one member it is perfectly achieved; adding only one more member to it puts it completely out of balance, and new accomodations must be found. The issues that will be important to a language group will also vary with time. For a young community formatting, disambiguating, and getting the software to work with the language may be the most important issue. If at the same time all members of that community share the same POV about abortion (whether for or against) it is as neutral as you can expect under the circumstances.
Ec
Yann Forget wrote:
Your argumentation assumes that because the contributors of the English WP come from "all over the world", it is more NPOV. On my POV, the English is not more NPOV than others (at least the French one which I know), because the fact is that there are very few contributors from Arab, African and Asian coutries. In fact, most of the contributors come from rich countries and very few from Third World countries.
But that also true for other WP. And that OK as long as you don't pretend that it is perfectly NPOV. It is NPOV for English contributors from rich countries. Not exactly the same. ;o)
I don't think that's accurate: there are a *lot* of contributors to the English Wikipedia who are not from English-speaking countries, and many of them don't even speak English very well at all (which is fine--as long as their information is good, others can correct their phrasing and grammar). There are in fact *many* contributors from Asian countries on the English Wikipedia, something which I think cannot be said for, say, the French or German or Spanish Wikipedias. Many of our articles on Hong Kong and Japan, in particular, are written by people who live in Hong Kong and Japan. Our articles on India are often contributed to by people from India. And so on.
This is what I think is a primary strength of the English Wikipedia: people from the countries we're writing about are actually here to participate. Do we have any idea number in all areas? No. But do we at least have some, and certainly orders of magnitude more than any other language's Wikipedia? Yes.
To get decently towards NPOV, I think a Wikipedia needs contributors from as many countries and backgrounds as possible. To my knowledge, the English Wikipedia has contributors from: the United States, the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Greece, Italy, Russia, the Ukraine, Spain, Mexico, Israel, Brazil, Australia, India, China (incl. Hong Kong), Japan, South Korea, Ireland, Nepal, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Portugal, and likely a lot of others I've forgotten to list.
I'm skeptical that any other Wikipedias come even close to this, and I'm also skeptical that many of them ever will: what are the chances that people from each of the above countries will ever participate in, say, the Hindi Wikipedia?
My point, more succinctly: to have any chance at all at NPOV, an encyclopedia needs to be an international project, and so must be written in a language spoken by many people internationally. English so far appears to be the best-off in that regard, though I'm not saying it's necessarily the only possibility (French, Spanish, and German seem like good candidates as well). But I'm skeptical that, say, 300 Wikipedias is a good idea, or likely to lead to anything other than 5-7 good ones, and a hundred incredibly biased ones.
-Mark
On Thu, Dec 04, 2003 at 11:16:20AM -0800, Delirium wrote:
To get decently towards NPOV, I think a Wikipedia needs contributors from as many countries and backgrounds as possible. To my knowledge, the English Wikipedia has contributors from: the United States, the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Greece, Italy, Russia, the Ukraine, Spain, Mexico, Israel, Brazil, Australia, India, China (incl. Hong Kong), Japan, South Korea, Ireland, Nepal, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Portugal, and likely a lot of others I've forgotten to list.
I'm skeptical that any other Wikipedias come even close to this, and I'm also skeptical that many of them ever will: what are the chances that people from each of the above countries will ever participate in, say, the Hindi Wikipedia?
I bet that Esperanto speaker are more wide-spread on the globe than English. Also Esperanto seems to have a strong community open for new idea like Wikipedia.
ciao, tom
Delirium wrote:
What are the chances, for example, that the Greek Wikipedia (assuming it ever gets off the ground) will have a history of the Greek-Turkish (or Greek-FYROM) conflict with NPOV standards similar to the descriptions of those conflicts in the English Wikipedia?
I don't really know anything about the Greeks, but I would imagine that the difficulty of approaching NPOV is inversely related to the diversity of the population, as you surmise.
It is true that English is spoken by people from many countries, but it is also true that even within the United States, there is remarkable diversity of opinion. I would imagine that Germany has a similarly wide diversity of opinion, even within Germany itself.
Japan might be a good example, in that (it if often said) Japanese culture is more homogenous than that of most other "large" countries.
So I guess my question is: do people think it is likely that Wikipedias in languages that are spoken almost exclusively by people of one particular national background can ever hope to achieve anything even remotely resembling the NPOV on the Wikipedias in languages that are spoken by a wide range of people? Is having contributors from a wide range of backgrounds a necessary prerequisite for NPOV (as I suggest)?
I think you're certainly onto something here, but I'd also say that if the "people of one particular national background" have significant internal diversity, that's enough.
I mean, I think that the United States has plenty of people ready to be sharply critical of the U.S. government, even though they live here.
--Jimbo
On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 09:52:55PM -0800, Delirium wrote: [...]
So I guess my question is: do people think it is likely that Wikipedias in languages that are spoken almost exclusively by people of one particular national background can ever hope to achieve anything even remotely resembling the NPOV on the Wikipedias in languages that are spoken by a wide range of people? Is having contributors from a wide range of backgrounds a necessary prerequisite for NPOV (as I suggest)?
But the English Wikipedia isn't NPOV at all ! Especially on anything related to Middle East conflict, it almost invariantly has Israeli bias, probably because of relatively large number of American Jewish contributors, compared to hardly any Arab contributors.
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Hi,
Le Thursday 04 December 2003 21:50, Tomasz Wegrzanowski a écrit :
So I guess my question is: do people think it is likely that Wikipedias in languages that are spoken almost exclusively by people of one particular national background can ever hope to achieve anything even remotely resembling the NPOV on the Wikipedias in languages that are spoken by a wide range of people? Is having contributors from a wide range of backgrounds a necessary prerequisite for NPOV (as I suggest)?
But the English Wikipedia isn't NPOV at all ! Especially on anything related to Middle East conflict, it almost invariantly has Israeli bias, probably because of relatively large number of American Jewish contributors, compared to hardly any Arab contributors.
Yes, that what I mean. And there are other subjects with the same situation.
Yann
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From: Tomasz Wegrzanowski Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 3:50 PM To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] non-English Wikipedias
On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 09:52:55PM -0800, Delirium wrote: [...]
So I guess my question is: do people think it is likely that
Wikipedias
in languages that are spoken almost exclusively by people of one particular national background can ever hope to achieve anything
even
remotely resembling the NPOV on the Wikipedias in languages that are spoken by a wide range of people? Is having contributors from a
wide
range of backgrounds a necessary prerequisite for NPOV (as I
suggest)?
But the English Wikipedia isn't NPOV at all ! Especially on anything related to Middle East conflict, it almost invariantly has Israeli bias, probably because of relatively large
number
of American Jewish contributors, compared to hardly any Arab
contributors.
*Nothing* on Wikipedia is NPOV. It can't be. For one thing NPOV stands for "Neutral point of view" and the sentence "Wikipedia is neutral point of view" is nonsensical.
But I'll put that fight against newspeak aside.
It's impossible for any given entry on Wikipedia to have a truly neutral point of view.
What we can do, what we can measure, is what is the direction of Wikipedia's coverage of a subject. If the coverage is becoming more comprehensive, more grounded in references, more based on detail and reportage and fact, then we can say that the coverage is approaching a neutral point of view.
NPOV should be a measure of change and direction, a way to judge the Wikipedia process, not an avenue to attack an instant in Wikipedia's history.
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 09:52:55PM -0800, Delirium wrote: [...]
So I guess my question is: do people think it is likely that Wikipedias in languages that are spoken almost exclusively by people of one particular national background can ever hope to achieve anything even remotely resembling the NPOV on the Wikipedias in languages that are spoken by a wide range of people? Is having contributors from a wide range of backgrounds a necessary prerequisite for NPOV (as I suggest)?
But the English Wikipedia isn't NPOV at all ! Especially on anything related to Middle East conflict, it almost invariantly has Israeli bias, probably because of relatively large number of American Jewish contributors, compared to hardly any Arab contributors.
That's quite possibly true; I wasn't arguing the English Wikipedia is perfect on all topics, or anything remotely close to that. I do think though, that if any Wikipedia is going to succeed in creating something approaching a NPOV description of the Middle East conflict, the English Wikipedia has a *much* better chance of doing so than, say, either the Hebrew or Arabic Wikipedias do.
-Mark
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .
Hi,
I am a) writing a student research paper and b) going to have a lecture on a german linux-congress about Wikipedia. Has there anybody done this before? I know the lecture of Kurt Janson last year on 19C3 in Berlin but is there no newer stuff? Well I know what to write and talk but I am just wondering why there are so little (=practically no) scientific publications or conference papers (=everything but simple newspaper articles) on Wikipedia yet. On the other hand I don't mind if I am the first one ;-)
The only references I found (up to now):
http://wiki.wizards-of-os.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Wikipedia_And_Friend s
I haven't read it yet, but the new issue of First Monday contains an academic article about Wikipedia:
Phantom authority, self-selective recruitment and retention of members in virtual communities: The case of Wikipedia by Andrea Ciffolilli http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/ciffolilli/
__ . / / / / ... Till Westermayer - till we *) . . . mailto:till@tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072 . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179 . . . . .
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