[Wikimediaindia-l] [Press] : New York Times : "When Knowledge Isn?t Written, Does It Still Count?"

Tue Aug 9 06:31:49 UTC 2011

Dear All
NewYork Times : "When Knowledge Isn?t Written, Does It Still Count?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/business/media/a-push-to-redefine-knowledge-at-wikipedia.html

This is a nice article. 

1) On mr-wiki I am trying to convince the community to be more flexible on info 
coming from rural Maharashtra. For an example in an village related articles 
some one writes about which farm produce which educational institutions are 
there, we need not ask reference for such aspects.In rural India as there are 
good institution which we can take note of  but risk part is there are equal or 
more number of fake institutions and they may end up taking undue benefit of 
having mention of their institution in fooling rest of the ignorant population 
that is the risk.

2) Way back on strategy wiki I did put a Proposal:Audio/visual  Presentation 
Competition  While there I did not get anticipated support but I wish Wikimedia 
India Chapter and/Or India program and Indic wikipedians revisit this proposal

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Audio/visual_Presentation_Competition

Regards
User Mahitgar from Marathi Wikipedia

________________________________
From: "wikimediaindia-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org" 
<wikimediaindia-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org>
To: wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Tue, 9 August, 2011 6:04:19 AM
Subject: Wikimediaindia-l Digest, Vol 38, Issue 13

Send Wikimediaindia-l mailing list submissions to
    wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
    https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
    wikimediaindia-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org

You can reach the person managing the list at
    wikimediaindia-l-owner at lists.wikimedia.org

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of Wikimediaindia-l digest..."

Today's Topics:

   1. Re: [Press] : New York Times : "When Knowledge Isn?t Written,
      Does It Still Count?" (wheredevelsdare at hotmail.com)
   2. Re: [Press] : New York Times : "When Knowledge Isn?t Written,
      Does It Still Count?" (Naveen Francis)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2011 05:00:39 +0000
From: <wheredevelsdare at hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Press] : New York Times : "When
    Knowledge Isn?t Written, Does It Still Count?"
To: Wikipedia India Mailing List
    <wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID: <SNT117-W52033416B0BB25ED58A517BD200 at phx.gbl>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"

Sure - offline or non-english refs are accepted AGF!

From: naveenpf at gmail.com
Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2011 07:31:47 +0530
To: wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l]    [Press] : New York Times : "When Knowledge 
Isn?t Written, Does It Still Count?"

Nice article ... :)

Hi Tinu,

One doubt in referencing; can we keep text indic languages as reference in 
English wikipedia ?

        Naveen Francis

                Signature powered by 

            WiseStamp

    On 8 August 2011 23:13, CherianTinu Abraham <tinucherian at gmail.com> wrote:

NewYork Times : "When Knowledge Isn?t Written, Does It Still Count?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/business/media/a-push-to-redefine-knowledge-at-wikipedia.html

?MAKING fun of Wikipedia is so 2007,? a French journalist said recently to Sue 
Gardner, the executive director of the foundation that runs the Wikipedia 
project.

And so Ms. Gardner, in turn, told an auditorium full of Wikipedia contributors 
and supporters on Thursday in Haifa, Israel, the host city for the seventh 
annual Wikimania conference, where meetings and presentations focus on the 
world?s most used, and perhaps least understood, online reference work.

Once routinely questioned about its reliability ? what do you mean, anyone can 
edit it? ? the site is now used every month by upwards of 400 million people 
worldwide. But with influence and respect come responsibility, and lately 
Wikipedia has been criticized from without and within for reflecting a Western, 
male-dominated mindset similar to the perspective behind the encyclopedias it 
has replaced.

Seeing Wikipedia as The Man, in so many words, is so 2011.
And that?s a problem for an encyclopedia that wants to grow. Some critics of 
Wikipedia believe that the whole Western tradition of footnotes and sourced 
articles needs to be rethought if Wikipedia is going to continue to gather 
converts beyond its current borders. And that, in turn, invites an entirely new 
debate about what constitutes knowledge in different parts of the world and how 
a Western institution like Wikipedia can capitalize on it.

Achal Prabhala, an adviser to Ms. Gardner?s Wikimedia Foundation who lives and 
writes in Bangalore, India, has made perhaps the most trenchant criticism in a 
video project, ?People are Knowledge,? that he presented in Haifa (along with 
its clunky subtitle, ?Exploring alternative methods of citation for Wikipedia?).

The film, which was made largely with a $20,000 grant from the Wikimedia 
Foundation, spends time showing what has been lost to Wikipedia because of 
stickling rules of citation and verification. If Wikipedia purports to collect 
the ?sum of all human knowledge,? in the words of one of its founders, Jimmy 
Wales, that, by definition, means more than printed knowledge, Mr. Prabhala 
said.

In the case of dabba kali, a children?s game played in the Kerala state of 
India, there was a Wikipedia article in the local language, Malayalam, that 
included photos, a drawing and a detailed description of the rules, but no 
sources to back up what was written. Other than, of course, the 40 million 
people who played it as children.

There is no doubt, he said, that the article would have been deleted from 
English Wikipedia if it didn?t have any sources to cite. Those are the rules of 
the game, and those are the rules he would like to change, or at least bend, or, 
if all else fails, work around.

?There is this desire to grow Wikipedia in parts of the world,? he said, adding 
that ?if we don?t have a more generous and expansive citation policy, the 
current one will prove to be a massive roadblock that you literally can?t get 
past. There is a very finite amount of citable material, which means a very 
finite number of articles, and there will be no more.?

Mr. Prabhala, 38, who grew up in India and then attended American universities, 
has been an activist on issues of intellectual property, starting with the 
efforts in South Africa to free up drugs that treat H.I.V. In the film, he gives 
other examples of subjects ? an alcohol produced in a village, Ga-Sabotlane, in 
Limpopo, South Africa, and a popular hopscotch-type children?s game, 
tshere-tshere ? beyond print documentation and therefore beyond Wikipedia?s 
true-and-tried method.

There are whole cultures, he said, that have little to no printed material to 
cite as proof about the way life is lived.
?Publishing is a system of power and I mean that in a completely pleasant, 
accepting sense,? he said mischievously. ?But it leaves out people.?

But Mr. Prabhala offers a solution: he and the video?s directors, Priya Sen and 
Zen Marie, spoke with people in African and Indian villages either in person or 
over the phone and had them describe basic activities. These recordings were 
then uploaded and linked to the article as sources, and suddenly an article that 
seems like it could be a personal riff looks a bit more academic.

For example, in his interview with a South African villager who explained how to 
make the alcoholic drink, morula, she repeatedly says that it is best if she 
demonstrates the process. When the fruit is ready, said the villager, Philipine 
Moremi, according to the project?s transcript of her phone conversation, ?we pry 
them open. We are going to show you how it is done. Once they are peeled, we 
seal them to ferment and then we drink.? The idea of treating personal testimony 
as a source for Wikipedia is still controversial, and reflects the concerns that 
dominated the encyclopedia project six years ago, when arguably its very 
existence was threatened.

After a series of hoaxes, culminating in a Wikipedia article in 2005 that 
maligned the newspaper editor John Seigenthaler for no discernible reason other 
than because a Wikipedia contributor could, the site tried to ensure that every 
statement could be traced to a source.

Then there is the rule ?no original research,? which was meant to say that 
Wikipedia doesn?t care if you are writing about the subway station you visit 
every day, find someone who has written reliably on the color of the walls 
there.

?The natural thing is getting more and more accurate, locking down articles, 
raising the bar on sources,? said Andrew Lih, an associate professor of 
journalism at the University of Southern California, who was an early 
contributor to Wikipedia and has written a history of its rise. ?Isn?t it great 
we have so many texts online??

But what works for the most developed societies, he said, won?t necessarily work 
for others. ?Lots of knowledge is not Googleable,? he said, ?and is not in a 
digital form.?

Mr. Lih said that he could see the Wikipedia project suddenly becoming energized 
by the process of documenting cultural practices around the world, or down the 
street.

Perhaps Mr. Prabhala?s most challenging argument is that by being text-focused, 
and being locked into the Encyclopedia Britannica model, Wikipedia risks being 
behind the times.
An 18-year-old is comfortable using ?objects of trust that have been created on 
the Internet,? he said, and ?Wikipedia isn?t taking advantage of that.? And, he 
added, ?it is quite possible that for the 18-year-old of today that Wikipedia 
looks like his father?s project. Or the kind of thing his father might be 
interested in.?

Ouch.

RegardsTinu Cherian

_______________________________________________

Wikimediaindia-l mailing list

Wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org

https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l

_______________________________________________
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
Wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l                 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: 
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/attachments/20110809/b0b77e48/attachment-0001.htm

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2011 10:33:57 +0530
From: Naveen Francis <naveenpf at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Press] : New York Times : "When
    Knowledge Isn?t Written, Does It Still Count?"
To: Wikimedia India Community list
    <wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
    <CABrp+ik2hKVqL5sOL=9vTV+O59Fr8G3URz_4pr=7LMWfiySkjQ at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"

Thanks Pranav !!

Naveen Francis
Signature powered by
<http://www.wisestamp.com/email-install?utm_source=extension&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=footer>

WiseStamp<http://www.wisestamp.com/email-install?utm_source=extension&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=footer>

On 9 August 2011 10:30, <wheredevelsdare at hotmail.com> wrote:

>  Sure - offline or non-english refs are accepted AGF!
>
> ------------------------------
> From: naveenpf at gmail.com
> Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2011 07:31:47 +0530
> To: wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Press] : New York Times : "When Knowledge
> Isn?t Written, Does It Still Count?"
>
>
> Nice article ... :)
>
> Hi Tinu,
>
> One doubt in referencing; can we keep text indic languages as reference in
> English wikipedia ?
>
> Naveen Francis
>  Signature powered by 
><http://www.wisestamp.com/email-install?utm_source=extension&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=footer>
>
>WiseStamp<http://www.wisestamp.com/email-install?utm_source=extension&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=footer>
>>
> On 8 August 2011 23:13, CherianTinu Abraham <tinucherian at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> *NewYork Times : "When Knowledge Isn?t Written, Does It Still Count?"*
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/business/media/a-push-to-redefine-knowledge-at-wikipedia.html
>l
>
>
> *?MAKING fun of Wikipedia is so 2007,? a French journalist said recently
> to Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation that runs the
> Wikipedia project.*
> *
> *
> *And so Ms. Gardner, in turn, told an auditorium full of Wikipedia
> contributors and supporters on Thursday in Haifa, Israel, the host city for
> the seventh annual Wikimania conference, where meetings and presentations
> focus on the world?s most used, and perhaps least understood, online
> reference work.*
> *
> *
> *Once routinely questioned about its reliability ? what do you mean,
> anyone can edit it? ? the site is now used every month by upwards of 400
> million people worldwide. But with influence and respect come
> responsibility, and lately Wikipedia has been criticized from without and
> within for reflecting a Western, male-dominated mindset similar to the
> perspective behind the encyclopedias it has replaced.*
> *
> *
> *Seeing Wikipedia as The Man, in so many words, is so 2011.*
> *
> *
> *And that?s a problem for an encyclopedia that wants to grow. Some critics
> of Wikipedia believe that the whole Western tradition of footnotes and
> sourced articles needs to be rethought if Wikipedia is going to continue to
> gather converts beyond its current borders. And that, in turn, invites an
> entirely new debate about what constitutes knowledge in different parts of
> the world and how a Western institution like Wikipedia can capitalize on it.
> *
> *
> *
> *Achal Prabhala, an adviser to Ms. Gardner?s Wikimedia Foundation who
> lives and writes in Bangalore, India, has made perhaps the most trenchant
> criticism in a video project, ?People are Knowledge,? that he presented in
> Haifa (along with its clunky subtitle, ?Exploring alternative methods of
> citation for Wikipedia?).*
> *
> *
> *The film, which was made largely with a $20,000 grant from the Wikimedia
> Foundation, spends time showing what has been lost to Wikipedia because of
> stickling rules of citation and verification. If Wikipedia purports to
> collect the ?sum of all human knowledge,? in the words of one of its
> founders, Jimmy Wales, that, by definition, means more than printed
> knowledge, Mr. Prabhala said.*
> *
> *
> *In the case of dabba kali, a children?s game played in the Kerala state
> of India, there was a Wikipedia article in the local language, Malayalam,
> that included photos, a drawing and a detailed description of the rules, but
> no sources to back up what was written. Other than, of course, the 40
> million people who played it as children.*
> *
> *
> *There is no doubt, he said, that the article would have been deleted from
> English Wikipedia if it didn?t have any sources to cite. Those are the rules
> of the game, and those are the rules he would like to change, or at least
> bend, or, if all else fails, work around.*
> *
> *
> *?There is this desire to grow Wikipedia in parts of the world,? he said,
> adding that ?if we don?t have a more generous and expansive citation policy,
> the current one will prove to be a massive roadblock that you literally
> can?t get past. There is a very finite amount of citable material, which
> means a very finite number of articles, and there will be no more.?*
> *
> *
> *Mr. Prabhala, 38, who grew up in India and then attended American
> universities, has been an activist on issues of intellectual property,
> starting with the efforts in South Africa to free up drugs that treat H.I.V.
> In the film, he gives other examples of subjects ? an alcohol produced in a
> village, Ga-Sabotlane, in Limpopo, South Africa, and a popular
> hopscotch-type children?s game, tshere-tshere ? beyond print documentation
> and therefore beyond Wikipedia?s true-and-tried method.*
> *
> *
> *There are whole cultures, he said, that have little to no printed
> material to cite as proof about the way life is lived.*
> *
> *
> *?Publishing is a system of power and I mean that in a completely
> pleasant, accepting sense,? he said mischievously. ?But it leaves out
> people.?*
> *
> *
> *But Mr. Prabhala offers a solution: he and the video?s directors, Priya
> Sen and Zen Marie, spoke with people in African and Indian villages either
> in person or over the phone and had them describe basic activities. These
> recordings were then uploaded and linked to the article as sources, and
> suddenly an article that seems like it could be a personal riff looks a bit
> more academic.*
> *
> *
> *For example, in his interview with a South African villager who explained
> how to make the alcoholic drink, morula, she repeatedly says that it is best
> if she demonstrates the process. When the fruit is ready, said the villager,
> Philipine Moremi, according to the project?s transcript of her phone
> conversation, ?we pry them open. We are going to show you how it is done.
> Once they are peeled, we seal them to ferment and then we drink.? The idea
> of treating personal testimony as a source for Wikipedia is still
> controversial, and reflects the concerns that dominated the encyclopedia
> project six years ago, when arguably its very existence was threatened.*
> *
> *
> *After a series of hoaxes, culminating in a Wikipedia article in 2005 that
> maligned the newspaper editor John Seigenthaler for no discernible reason
> other than because a Wikipedia contributor could, the site tried to ensure
> that every statement could be traced to a source.*
> *
> *
> *Then there is the rule ?no original research,? which was meant to say
> that Wikipedia doesn?t care if you are writing about the subway station you
> visit every day, find someone who has written reliably on the color of the
> walls there.*
> *
> *
> *?The natural thing is getting more and more accurate, locking down
> articles, raising the bar on sources,? said Andrew Lih, an associate
> professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, who was an
> early contributor to Wikipedia and has written a history of its rise. ?Isn?t
> it great we have so many texts online??*
> *
> *
> *But what works for the most developed societies, he said, won?t
> necessarily work for others. ?Lots of knowledge is not Googleable,? he said,
> ?and is not in a digital form.?*
> *
> *
> *Mr. Lih said that he could see the Wikipedia project suddenly becoming
> energized by the process of documenting cultural practices around the world,
> or down the street.*
> *
> *
> *Perhaps Mr. Prabhala?s most challenging argument is that by being
> text-focused, and being locked into the Encyclopedia Britannica model,
> Wikipedia risks being behind the times.*
> *
> *
> *An 18-year-old is comfortable using ?objects of trust that have been
> created on the Internet,? he said, and ?Wikipedia isn?t taking advantage of
> that.? And, he added, ?it is quite possible that for the 18-year-old of
> today that Wikipedia looks like his father?s project. Or the kind of thing
> his father might be interested in.?*
> *
> *
> *Ouch.*
>
>
>
>
> Regards
> Tinu Cherian
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
> Wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing
> list Wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
> Wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: 
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/attachments/20110809/1fc12983/attachment.htm

------------------------------

_______________________________________________
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
Wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l

End of Wikimediaindia-l Digest, Vol 38, Issue 13
************************************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/attachments/20110809/4a7e1a2a/attachment-0001.htm 