[Wikimedia Brasil] PORT: The Missing Wikipedians

[Everton Zanella Alvarenga]

Carol pegando o espírito dos mutirões...

Tante grazie!

Em 22 de fevereiro de 2011 22:42, Carolina Rossini
<carolrossiniatwiki em gmail.com> escreveu:
> a pedidos e bem resumindo
> o artigo tenta discutir o tema sobre a estagnacao no crescimento do numero
> dos wikipedistas ...mas tenta focar nao na wikipedia-en, mas nas wikipedias
> de paises em desenvolvimento
> apresenta um examplo de Kenya e discute se somente o acesso a internet vai
> significar a possibilidade de inclusao desse povo como editores e leitores
> da wikipedia, como - em geral - se pensa (ja li coisas assim nas paginas do
> Meta...ate mesmo sobre o Brasil...)
> ai entra num debate relevante e atual para a lista ...o "deletismo", que
> hoje parece ser oficialmente chamado de wiki-lawyering ...pratica que ainda
> esta sob batalha em muitas wikipedias pelo mundo (ou seja, nao so os
> Brasileiros estao nesse momento de discussao)...ai ela apresenta um
> resultado de estudo que juntou dados de reversao e disse que parece que os
> "deletistas" estao ganhando
>
>
> "The Palo Alto Research Center group suggested that the ‘deletionists might
> have won’ when they found that the number of reverted edits has increased
> steadily, and that occasional editors experience a visibly greater
> resistance compared to high-frequency editors.
>
> According to Suh et al., ‘Since 2003, edits from occasional editors have
> been reverted (at) a higher rate than edits from prolific editors.
> Furthermore, this disparity of treatment of new edits from editors of
> different classes has been widening steadily over the years at the expense
> of low-frequency editors. We consider this as evidence of growing resistance
> from the Wikipedia community to new content, especially when the edits come
> from occasional editors’." (coloca no google translator)
>
> Ai, ela aponta uma citacao que considero muito importante....
>
> According to Kollock, ‘a person is motivated to contribute valuable
> information to the group in the expectation that one will receive useful
> help and information in return that is, the motivation is an anticipated
> reciprocity’.
>
> e que ja apontei aqui...quando um contribui com boa vontade e conteudo
> aberto (e tempo) espera que seja bem tratado como uma questao de
> reciprocidade
>
> alem da reciprocidade aponta outras motivacoes, como reputacao, senso de
> eficiencia, etc...como motivadores da participacao e crescimento de editores
> em wikipedias pelo mundo
> ela conclui dizendo que mesmo existinfo wikipedias locais, em funcao dos
> motivadores acima e da estabilidade da wikipedia-en...pode ser que muita
> gente de paises em desenvolvimento acabe decidindo contribuir para a
> wikipedia-en e nao para wikipedia locais
> bem...ai esta o resumo relampago
> 2011/2/18 Cecilia Tanaka <cecilia.tanaka em gmail.com>
>>
>> The Missing Wikipedians
>>
>> The Missing Wikipedians
>>
>> Download PDF or view on Slideshare
>>
>> Much has been said of the future of Wikipedia. Some have prophesied that
>> the online encyclopaedia will fail due to increasing spam. Others have said
>> that, as large parts of the world go online, Wikipedia might see a wave of
>> new editors as countries from Zambia to Indonesia begin to fill in
>> Wikipedia’s blank spots. In a project that aims to ‘make all human knowledge
>> accessible’, those blank spots can mean many things: the hundreds of
>> thousands of places that aren’t talked about on Wikipedia, the thousands of
>> languages that either don’t have their own encyclopaedia or are struggling
>> to build one, and the countless things that people know about their world
>> but aren’t in written form.
>>
>> This essay is concerned, not so much with the future of the English
>> version of Wikipedia (about which much of the prophesying occurs) but with
>> the 277 other language Wikipedias. Will this number shrink as editors grow
>> tired of their lonely pursuits, or will it grow as more of the world goes
>> online? As large parts of Africa go online, it is expected that they will
>> start to edit Wikipedia and that they will edit it in their own language.
>> Both of these assumptions may be incorrect. Firstly, there are a number of
>> external and internal limitations to this new wave of editors joining
>> Wikipedia, and secondly, the scale of smaller Wikipedias may mean that they
>> are over-shadowed by stronger motivations to edit the larger, more powerful
>> English version.
>>
>> ‘Makmende’s so huge, he can’t fit in Wikipedia[2]’
>>
>> In mid-2010, a furore erupted in a small corner of the Internet. The facts
>> sounded all-too familiar: another group of Wikipedia editors fighting over
>> whether something was notable or not. The so-called ‘deletionists’ against
>> the ‘inclusionists’ – those who thought that the encyclopaedia needed to
>> retain a certain quality and that strict editorial control was necessary,
>> versus those who thought that Wikipedia’s goal is to be a different
>> encyclopaedia – one that is much broader and more global than any other
>> existing encyclopaedia.
>>
>> But a closer look at this blip on Wikipedia’s radar exposed some
>> interesting details – details that exposed this as a story that epitomises
>> Wikipedia’s current growth problems and the challenges it faces as it seeks
>> to ‘make all human knowledge accessible’. The frontline of this battle: a
>> page called ‘Makmende’ that was struggling to be born on the English
>> encyclopaedia.
>>
>> In March of 2010, Kenya had enjoyed what has been touted as its first
>> viral Internet sensation. While even Eastern Europe has had its share of
>> singing kittens and political remixes, this East African country had not
>> enjoyed the success that comes when the world recognises a local meme that
>> captures the imagination of those outside of it. The meme was based on an
>> interesting local hack of Hollywood culture that originated on the streets
>> of Kenya in the 1990s.
>>
>> The Swahili slang (sheng) word for ‘hero’, ‘Makmende’ originates from a
>> mispronunciation of Clint Eastwood’s phrase “Go ahead, make my day” (Mek ma
>> nday) – a phrase that became popular in the streets of Kenya in the 1990s
>> when a ‘bad guy wannabe would be called out and asked “Who do you think you
>> are? Makmende?”’ In early 2010, local band, ‘Just a Band’ resurrected the
>> fictional Kenyan superhero in the music video for their song Ha-He. In the
>> music video for their song, the band features Makmende beating up the ‘bad
>> guys’ and even ignoring the girl in a hilarious throwback to the fictional
>> character.
>>
>> What followed was a popular acknowledgement of Makmende that resonated
>> outwards from local Twitter users. Like other successful memes, Makmende
>> enabled people to participate in the joke and to thereby “own” a little
>> piece of the meme. According to local digital marketing strategist, Mark
>> Kaigwa, people either took popular Chuck Norris jokes and replaced them with
>> Makmende, or they created their own. Radio stations in Nairobi invited
>> people to call in with Makmende jokes when local journalists like Larry
>> Madowo noticed the attention that Makmende was getting on Twitter, and the
>> Kenyan twittasphere seemed to be buzzing with their own Chuck Norris.
>>
>> In the midst of enthusiasm, Makmende fans tried to create a Wikipedia page
>> about the meme. Wikipedia admins repeatedly deleted the page, initially on
>> ‘criteria for speedy deletion’ G1 (‘Patent nonsense, meaningless, or
>> incomprehensible’), then G12 (‘Unambiguous copyright infringement)’ and
>> finally G3 (‘Pure Vandalism’).
>>
>> Wikipedia editors claimed that the article needed to be deleted because
>> there existed ‘no reliable sources, and no claims of notability’. Pointing
>> to the lack of sources relating to African culture online, user, Cicinne
>> came back with this retort: ‘The problem is that there is hardly any content
>> on African influences in the 90′s and 80′s which may make it hard to make
>> the connections’.
>>
>> On March 24, the Wall Street Journal’s Cassandra Vinograd commented on the
>> story, reporting that ‘Kenyan bloggers and Tweeters (had) seized on the
>> video and launched a campaign for the man they’re calling Kenya’s very own
>> Chuck Norris – complete with one liners about Makmende’s superhero skills
>> and prowess.’ According to the WSJ, Makmende had drawn more than 24,300 hits
>> in the week since its release and had collected 19,200 fans on Facebook.
>>
>> The article was deleted once again, prompting Ethan Zuckerman to write a
>> blog post about the systemic bias operating in the encyclopaedia community
>> that would delete the stub:
>>
>> The one that’s currently under development followed a classic Wikipedia
>> structure – it went up as a brief stub, and has accreted more content in the
>> past few hours. What concerned me is that the attempt to delete that stub
>> argued that the article was unsourced – actually, it was quite well sourced,
>> including a reference to a Wall Street Journal online publication and five
>> weblogs. Perhaps the user who nominated for deletion made a mistake. Or
>> perhaps he acted in bad faith, trying to avoid a battle over notability and
>> tried a different tactic to see the page removed.
>> If Wikipedia wants to make progress in improving areas where it’s weak –
>> i.e., if it wants to address issues of systemic bias – the community needs
>> to expand to include more Wikipedians from the developing world. Deleting
>> three versions of an article important to Kenyans and trying to delete a
>> fourth doesn’t send a strong message that Wikipedia is the open and
>> welcoming community you and I both want it to be.
>>
>> After being covered on CNN, Fast Company and numerous location Kenyan
>> publications (most of which are not online), the article was eventually
>> voted ‘keep’ citing the WSJ post as proof of notability required to survive
>> and move past the deletion debates. The question then became: if something
>> needs to be ‘notable’ to get on Wikipedia, by whose standards are we judging
>> notability? Is it about numbers, about reputation? Can this be measured? And
>> would this have been such a debate if it had occurred elsewhere in the
>> world?
>>
>> This story epitomises the challenges facing Wikipedia as it comes up
>> against the scope of a traditional encyclopaedia. Ethan Zuckerman summed it
>> up as follows:
>>
>> Most Wikipedians seemed to accept the idea that different languages and
>> cultures might want to include different topics in their encyclopedias. But
>> what happens when we share a language but not a culture? Is there a point
>> where Makmende is sufficiently important to English-speaking Kenyans that he
>> merits a Wikipedia page even if most English-speakers couldn’t care less? Or
>> is there an implicit assumption that an English-language Wikipedia is
>> designed to enshrine landmarks of shared historical and cultural importance
>> to people who share a language?
>>
>> Interestingly, Makmende does not exist in the Swahili version of
>> Wikipedia, and the battle to put Makmende on Wikipedia came just two months
>> after Kenyans were being incentivized by Google to create Swahili Wikipedia
>> pages. There seems to be a disconnect between where ordinary Kenyans want
>> their cultural narratives to live, and where outsiders imagine it.
>>
>> This story doesn’t only represent a clash between the inclusionists and
>> deletionists in Wikipedia. It also reflects key issues about the
>> relationship between different Wikipedias in countries where English
>> dominates as the written language; about the motivations of Wikipedians on
>> the edges of the Wikipedia network; and about tensions between existing
>> policies, the goal of the encyclopaedia and the realities of historical
>> knowledge in the developing world.
>>
>> Background: Wikipedia growth is slowing
>>
>> In August of 2006, Diego Torquemada drew a statistical model that
>> predicted the future growth of English Wikipedia to reach 6 million articles
>> by the end of 2008. This model was based on the premise that more content
>> leads to more traffic which leads to more edits which generates more content
>> on the encyclopaedia. Wikipedia had enjoyed exponential growth until that
>> point, with the number of articles doubling annually from 2002 to 2006.
>>
>> Torquemada could not know that Wikipedia growth had reached its peak in
>> 2006 when he developed his model. At a rate of 60,000 articles per month in
>> mid-2006, the number of new articles would start to follow a downward trend
>> reaching the point of around 35,000 new articles per month by the end of
>> 2009. The number of edits similarly reached a peak in 2007 with 6 million
>> edits and active editors at 800,000. At the end of 2009, the number of edits
>> had levelled out to about 5.5 million and active editors were down to around
>> 700,000.
>>
>> The slowing growth of Wikipedia has been the subject of a number of news
>> articles, as Internet commentators predict the slow demise of Wikipedia, and
>> Wikipedians fight back, saying that they are merely “consolidating”.
>>
>> In trying to understand the slowing growth of Wikipedia, researchers at
>> Palo Alto Research Center took a closer look at the data and interpreted an
>> ecological model to explain the slowing growth. Suh, Convertino, Chi and
>> Pirolli likened the stagnation to a Darwinian ‘struggle for existence’ in
>> the encyclopaedia, noting that ‘as populations hit the limits of the
>> ecology, advantages go to members of the population that have competitive
>> dominance over others’.
>>
>> Suh et al argued that the ‘resource limitations’ can be likened to limited
>> opportunities to make novel contributions and that the consequences of these
>> increasing limitations will manifest itself in increased patterns of
>> conflict and dominance. Wikipedians, it seemed, had covered all the “easy”
>> articles and now had “nothing left to talk about”.
>>
>> Nothing left to talk about?
>>
>> Is Wikipedia really ‘running out of things to talk about’? Suh et al
>> suggested that the number of Wikipedia articles could increase due to the
>> growth of new knowledge as a result of new scientific studies and new events
>> but that the size of the encyclopaedia was still levelling out.
>>
>> Others like geographer, Mark Graham deride claims that Wikipedia is
>> ‘running out things to write about’ for other reasons. Mapping the presence
>> of geotags on Wikipedia, Graham found that there are still ‘whole continents
>> that remain a virtual “terra incognita”’ on Wikipedia and that if these
>> places were given the same detailed treatment as places in Western Europe
>> and North America, then Wikipedia is only just getting started.
>>
>> New Wikipedians as the developing world comes online?
>>
>> Graham suggests that, ‘It may be that when broadband reaches more parts of
>> Africa – helped by the landfall of superfast cables in August – that more
>> people there will start discovering Wikipedia, and that the site will see a
>> second explosion of new editors and articles about places that have so far
>> been ignored’.
>>
>> But it is doubtful whether Internet access alone will make people in
>> developing countries contribute to Wikipedia. In his study of twelve
>> different Wikipedia language versions, Morten Rask found that although
>> ‘there is a linear relation between the level of internet penetration and
>> reach of the Wikipedia network, there is a stronger linear relationship
>> between the level of human development and internet penetration’.
>>
>> Rask used the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development
>> Index in his study as a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy,
>> education, and standard of living for countries worldwide. He was interested
>> in finding out whether Wikipedia was only for ‘rich countries’ in order to
>> understand ‘who is open to work together in the sharing of knowledge’.
>>
>> Rask’s findings contradict the so-called ‘techno utopians’ who have
>> claimed that the mere existence of either the Internet or information and
>> communications technology have the ability to lift developing countries out
>> of poverty.  Techno utopians include commentators like Don Tapscott who
>> coined the phrase wikinomics to describe ‘deep changes in the structure and
>> modus operandi of the corporation and our economy, based on new competitive
>> principles such as openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally’.
>>
>> Tapscott believes that we are living through a ‘participation revolution
>> (that) opens up new possibilities for billions of people to play active
>> roles in their workplaces, communities, national democracies, and the global
>> economy at large. This has profound social benefits, including the
>> opportunity to make governments more accountable and lift millions of people
>> out of poverty’.
>>
>> Access to Wikipedia’s ‘revolutionary’ potential is an extension of this
>> techno utopian vision. Investigating the ‘reach and richness’ of Wikipedia,
>> Rask provides a solid critique of statements like Tapscott’s that ‘all one
>> needs is a computer, a network connection, and a bright spark of initiative
>> and creativity to join in the economy’ by showing that ‘Internet penetration
>> is not the only complete and sufficient variable’ for development. Analysing
>> data from twelve Wikipedia language versions, and mapping it to variables
>> such as the country’s Human Development Index and broadband penetration,
>> Rask was able to show that human development variables were much more
>> critical to participation in Wikipedia than broadband access.
>>
>> Internal limitations
>>
>> Apart from the external limitations of human development and broadband
>> penetration, Wikipedians on the edges of the network also face a number of
>> internal challenges that reflect a growing resistance within Wikipedia to
>> new content. As those from developing countries come online and try to edit
>> the encyclopedia, a number of conflicts have arisen due to tensions between
>> so-called ‘inclusionists’ and ‘deletionists’ in the encyclopaedia.
>>
>> ‘Inclusionists’ are Wikipedians who would rather see more articles – even
>> if they are short and/or poorly written, while ‘deletionists’ are concerned
>> with quality, believing that it is more important to have less, good quality
>> articles than more poorly written articles with questionable notability.
>>
>> In an article entitled, ‘The battle for Wikipedia’s soul’, The Economist
>> writes: ‘The behaviour of Wikipedia’s self-appointed deletionist guardians,
>> who excise anything that does not meet their standards, justifying their
>> actions with a blizzard of acronyms, is now known as “wiki-lawyering”’.
>>
>> The Palo Alto Research Center group suggested that the ‘deletionists might
>> have won’ when they found that the number of reverted edits has increased
>> steadily, and that occasional editors experience a visibly greater
>> resistance compared to high-frequency editors.
>>
>> According to Suh et al., ‘Since 2003, edits from occasional editors have
>> been reverted (at) a higher rate than edits from prolific editors.
>> Furthermore, this disparity of treatment of new edits from editors of
>> different classes has been widening steadily over the years at the expense
>> of low-frequency editors. We consider this as evidence of growing resistance
>> from the Wikipedia community to new content, especially when the edits come
>> from occasional editors’.
>>
>> Public goods and the costs of contribution
>>
>> If Wikipedia is available in Swahili, and the effort required to start a
>> Swahili page is lower than on the English version, why was the Kenyan
>> community so determined that the Makmende article exist on the English
>> version of Wikipedia?
>>
>> Clues to the answer can be found in debates about public goods. Wikipedia
>> can be considered to be a public good since it is non-rivalrous (one
>> person’s use of Wikipedia doesn’t deplete another person’s use of it) and
>> non-excludable (no one can be effectively excluded from using Wikipedia, if
>> they’re online at least). Peter Kollock, writing in the late 90s about
>> public goods and how their value shifts when it is placed online, declared
>> that all online community interaction creates public goods and that this is
>> a remarkable property of online interaction and unprecedented in the history
>> of human society.
>>
>> Unprecedented as it is, people still need to be motivated to contribute to
>> public goods. The question with regard to the Makmende case is: If people
>> will create public goods when motivations are higher than costs of
>> contributing, what are the relative costs for contributing to English vs
>> Swahili Wikipedia?
>>
>> It is clear from the Makmende example that Wikipedia newbies must navigate
>> a growing bureaucracy and complicated policies when dealing with English
>> Wikipedians, many of whom would rather not have to deal with any more
>> articles to improve. This creates a high barrier to entry that must be
>> offset by higher motivational factors in order to incentivise volunteer
>> activity.
>>
>> If the costs of contribution in terms of centralised control, bureaucracy
>> and the lack of ‘reliable’ sources are higher in the English Wikipedia, then
>> motivations for contributing must have been significantly higher for Kenyans
>> when contributing Makmende to the English version.
>>
>> In his paper on ‘The Economies of Online Cooperation’ Kollock notes four
>> motivations for providing public goods including anticipated reciprocity,
>> reputation, sense of efficacy and need.
>>
>> Reciprocity
>>
>> According to Kollock, ‘a person is motivated to contribute valuable
>> information to the group in the expectation that one will receive useful
>> help and information in return that is, the motivation is an anticipated
>> reciprocity’.
>>
>> The promise of reciprocity on the English Wikipedia is relatively high
>> based on the scale of contribution. Even though contributors account for
>> less than 1% of users, the scale of the encyclopaedia means that the numbers
>> of active contributors is about 40,000 active editors for 26 per million
>> speakers versus Swahili Wikipedia with 0.4 editors per million speakers
>> (about 20 active editors). According to Phares Kariuki, he created the
>> Makmende page because there are few opportunities to create a Wikipedia
>> entry that would be populated quickly. Kariuki said that he isn’t a regular
>> Wikipedia contributor and that the last time he contributed was many years
>> ago. He points to the small numbers who care enough to promote the page as a
>> problem. “If I started a page on my high school it would take six years to
>> build up.” Kariuki had tried to edit before but didn’t have much success. “I
>> am a heavy user like most of us here in Nairobi but there’s never really
>> been motivation to become an editor before,” he said.
>>
>> Wikipedians on the English Wikipedia are relatively assured that others
>> will continue to contribute, whereas contributors to smaller Wikipedias must
>> understand that numbers of editors are few and that Wikipedia may shut down
>> Wikipedias where growth has stagnated and where they have become overrun by
>> spam.
>>
>> Interestingly, Eric Goldman’s claim that ‘Wikipedia will fail in 5 years’
>> because of increasing spam has been more prophetic for smaller Wikipedias
>> than the English Wikipedia. According to Goldman, ‘free editability’
>> (allowing anyone to edit) is Wikipedia’s Achilles’ heel. The sheer scale of
>> the English Wikipedia has won out against spammers in English Wikipedia, but
>> smaller Wikipedias must face a continual battle – especially when their
>> numbers are so small in comparison to the spammers.
>>
>> Reputation
>>
>> Kollock noted that the effect of contributions on one’s reputation is
>> another possible motivation. ‘High quality information, impressive technical
>> details in one’s answers, a willingness to help others, and elegant writing
>> can al work to increase one’s prestige in the community,’ he found.
>>
>> It is interesting to note that the reputation motivation requires that
>> there are people to impress in the community. Because of the small scale of
>> Swahili Wikipedia, for example, the fact that one can gain prestige from the
>> group might not necessarily be positive if the real power lies outside the
>> group. The English version of Wikipedia receives 9 million views per hour,
>> whereas the Swahili version gets 1,700 with the effect that one’s reputation
>> is much more highly valued on the English version of Wikipedia.
>>
>> In addition, the content of the article is noteworthy. A description of
>> Kenya’s first Internet meme, it can be seen as Kenya’s unique contribution
>> to the global phenomenon of Internet memes. This wasn’t an article about the
>> British parliamentary system or the life cycle of bees – it was an article
>> that positioned itself in the global framework of Internet memes. ‘Look,
>> world,’ Kenyans seemed to be saying, ‘You have your Internet memes. Now we
>> do too!’
>>
>> If one looks at this through the information sharing lens, one can make a
>> parallel with the fact that people are more likely to contribute expertise
>> rather than organisational knowledge because of its unique character and
>> because it shows something of their unique nature. Kenyans were sharing this
>> information specifically on the English Wikipedia because it was unique in
>> the global sense and because they were about to contribute their expertise
>> on a subject that they had direct experience with for the first time.
>>
>> Sense of efficacy
>>
>> The third possible motivation proposed by Kollock is the sense that a
>> person contributes valuable information because the act results in a sense
>> of efficacy, that is, ‘a sense that she has some effect on this
>> environment’.
>>
>> Certainly, those editing Swahili Wikipedia must have a much larger sense
>> that they are affecting change in the environment since their edits are much
>> more likely to be accepted, and they are more likely able to develop
>> policies and rules in the emerging Wikipedia. Contrast this with the fact
>> that new content on English Wikipedia will most likely be reverted and one
>> recognises how one’s sense of efficacy on the environment is affected by
>> Wikipedia’s growing isolation from new editors.
>>
>> From another perspective, however, it can be said that the sense of
>> efficacy would be so much greater on the English Wikipedia since the content
>> of the article is so unique and would have an important impact in
>> diversifying the range of material on the English Wikipedia. In this sense,
>> even if the costs of contributing to English Wikipedia are higher, and even
>> if it is much more difficult to have an effect on the environment, the
>> resulting efficacy is large because it is a unique contribution.
>>
>> Need
>>
>> According to Kollock, the fourth motivation is altruistic in the sense
>> that individuals value the outcomes of others. ‘One may produce and
>> contribute a public good for the simple reason that a person or the group as
>> a whole has a need for it,’ he says. Here, there may be a stark difference
>> between the need for Swahili language content on Wikipedia as perceived by
>> the international community and the need within Kenya.
>>
>> Kenya’s official languages are Swahili and English, with most Kenyans
>> being trilingual, speaking their tribal language as well as Swahili and
>> English. English is the lingua franca of the global business community and
>> arguably that of the Internet.
>>
>> Despite 50 million speakers, the Swahili Wikipedia has only about 17,000
>> articles and 400,000 editors, and Swahili is considered more of a spoken
>> language than a written language. Thus, Kenyans may not regard the need to
>> develop a Swahili encyclopaedia as high when they are trying to improve
>> their English in order to become more established in global business.
>>
>> Conclusion
>>
>> Unhindered by long print publication schedules, Wikipedia is able to
>> reflect events and incidents as soon as they happen, rather than recording
>> only those that a smaller group of experts decide is important enough. As
>> broadband access grows in large parts of Africa and Asia, Wikipedia could
>> expand to include a massive new corpus of previously unrecognized
>> viewpoints.
>>
>> Recent studies have shown how power within Wikipedia is consolidating and
>> that attempts to broaden the scope of the encyclopaedia are often met with
>> aggressive deletionism. Wikipedia is said to be ‘revolutionary’ because it
>> is written by ‘ordinary people’ rather than ‘experts’, but whether experts
>> or ordinary people, Wikipedia still reflects the perspective of a small,
>> homogenous, geographically close community.
>>
>> Although the costs of contributing to smaller Wikipedias are arguably
>> lower, people in developing countries like Kenya see the English Wikipedia
>> as the relevant venue for articles that show Kenya’s unique contribution to
>> global phenomena. The motivations for contributing in English Wikipedia are
>> therefore much greater than contributing to the Swahili version, but it is
>> unlikely that the vast holes in geographical and cultural content will be
>> filled when the costs of contribution are so large.
>>
>> My conclusion is that, far from having nothing left to talk about,
>> Wikipedia has a number of holes, but that the homophily of the current
>> network is coming up against its need to expand and diversify. Without a
>> strategy for dealing with local notability, Wikipedia will continue to
>> battle to overcome its impediments to growth and will ultimately fail to
>> realise more diverse, global participation.
>>
>> Bibliography
>>
>> Angwin, J., & Fowler, G. A. (2009, November 27). Volunteers Log Off as
>> Wikipedia Ages – WSJ.com. WSJ.com. Retrieved from
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>>
>> Butler, B., Joyce, E., & Pike, J. (2008). Don’t look now, but we’ve
>> created a bureaucracy. In Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual CHI
>> conference on Human factors in computing systems  – CHI ’08 (p. 1101).
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>>
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>>
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>>
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>> http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2005/12/wikipedia_will.htm
>>
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>>
>> Graham, M. (2010, April 9). Mapping Wikipedia Biographies.
>> floatingsheep.org. Retrieved May 9, 2010, from
>> http://www.floatingsheep.org/2010/04/mapping-wikipedia-biographies.html
>>
>> Johnson, B. (2009, August 12). Wikipedia enters a new chapter. The
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>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/12/wikipedia-deletionist-inclusionist
>>
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>>
>> ________________________________
>>
>> [2] This was the headline of a blog post by Ethan Zuckerman
>> http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/03/24/makmendes-so-huge-he-cant-fit-in-wikipedia/
>>
>> --
>> "Discordo daquilo que dizes, mas defenderei até a morte o teu direito de o
>> dizeres". - Voltaire
>>
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