[WikiEN-l] The London Review of Books on Wikipedia

[Carcharoth]

On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 11:02 AM, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

> 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-data

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-on-shoulders/

...which is an interesting blog in its own right.

In this article:

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/06/19/236524/guardian-exposes-mps-expenses-to-crowdsourcing.htm

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