Peter Black's Freedom to Differ

Social media and US Airways Flight 1549

When US Airways Flight 1549 crash landed on the Hudson River, the event unfolded before the world on a range of social media websites.  Employees at Hill & Knowlton have put together two interesting presentations that illustrate the speed at which this event unfolded online.  The first is an animation created by Niall Cook that shows the rapid transformation of Wikipedia's entry on the crash of US Airways Flight 1549:

First 90 Minutes' Wikipedia Edits to US Airways Page
Uploaded by niallcook

Second, H&K Canada's digital team also captured (as the event unfolded) screen caps of key sites - search engines, blogs, social networks, corporate sites, aggregators etc.  Brendan Hodgson blogs that this "further demonstrates and reinforces the sheer dynamism of the communications environment in which we now exist; as it relates to the speed by which information on an incident is communicated and shared (e.g. via Twitter), the competitiveness as well as the synergy shaping the relationship between traditional and citizen media, and the actions taken by corporations to respond within this new environment":

Us Airways Crash 1549 Online Analysis

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: crash communications)

McCainPedia is not a real wiki

"McCainPedia" may well be good name for a website, but the DNC seems to have totally missed the point of using a wiki:

The DNC will tomorrow launch "McCainPedia," a wiki-like hub of their opposition research on the GOP nominee.

The site features a bevy of articles and documents organized into such categories as "economy," "security" and "ethics."

Unlike WIkipedia, though, the general public (and McCain's campaign) can't offer their own edits to the material.

Read more here (from Politico).

Wikipedia seeks CDA immunity ... and should get it

Wikipedia seeks immunity under the Communications Decency Act:

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia is asking a court to dismiss a libel lawsuit brought by literary agent Barbara Bauer, who alleges that she was described as "The Dumbest of the 20 Worst" in an article.

In papers filed in a New Jersey state court last week, Wikipedia argues that it is immune from liability under the federal Communications Decency Act. That law generally provides that Web sites can't be sued for comments posted by users.

"It's clearly the case that we have a statutory immunity and I expect that we will demonstrate that to the court," said Mike Godwin, general counsel at Wikipedia's parent company, the Wikimedia Foundation.

The case stems from a 2006 article about Bauer's company, the Barbara Bauer Literary Agency. She alleged in her lawsuit that the Wikipedia article libeled her by calling her "The Dumbest of the Twenty Worst" literary agents and asserting that she has "no documented sales at all."

..

There are few, if any, other instances where Wikipedia has been sued for libel in the U.S.--despite the fact that all content on the site is submitted by users and edited by volunteers. But even without a clear track record of lawsuits against Wikipedia, other court decisions interpreting the Communications Decency Act give the site solid cause for optimism that the case will be dismissed, according to Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. "There is no doubt that Wikimedia qualifies for (immunity) for any claims based on user submissions or edits to Wikipedia, and I would expect any associated lawsuit against Wikimedia alleging libel to be tossed quickly," he said.

Wikipedia also argues that the case should be dismissed because some of the alleged comments complained about are opinions, which courts have said can't be considered defamatory. "Calling people 'dumb' is not libelous," said Matt Zimmerman, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is part of Wikimedia's legal team.

Read more here (from Media Post).

The Truth According to Wikipedia

TechCrunch reports that Dutch filmmaker IJsbrand van Veelen stirred a lot of controversy last week at the Next Web conference when he premiered his documentary The Truth About Wikipedia.  Read more here.  The documentary is now available to watch on YouTube:

Australia 2020 for everyone

Jim Rettrew is trying to give all Australians a way to participate in the Australia 2020 Summit:

For the 20 million people not invited to the 2020 Summit, the online community created a wiki so people across Australia could post, discuss, and vote on the best ideas for the country.   It’s like a virtual 2020 Summit for the whole country.  It’s totally a grassroots effort.  It’s free, can be anonymous, and as I mentioned, isn’t being sponsored by any political party, corporation, union, or special interests.  It’s just people who want to encourage an online national brainstorming session.

The site is at http://ozideas.wetpaint.com/?t=anon.  There are pages for over 20 different issues and even an online petition to get the best ideas heard at the actual Summit.

So far, we’ve had over 180 ideas submitted, 2000 unique visitors and 15,000 pages views.

The more people know about it, the more ideas are submitted, and the better the discussion.

He has also put together (with the help of this JibJab) this video to promote the site:

Wikipedia's soul

The Economist analyses the battle for Wikipedia's soul:

IT IS the biggest encyclopedia in history and the most successful example of “user-generated content” on the internet, with over 9m articles in 250 languages contributed by volunteers collaborating online. But Wikipedia is facing an identity crisis as it is torn between two alternative futures. It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between “inclusionists”, who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and “deletionists” who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries.

Read more here.

A new way to be dumped?

Valleywag reports on what may be a world first:

This is surely a first: Breaking up with a girlfriend via Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales, the creator of the world's best collection of Outkast lyrics, has announced in a statement on the website that he's no longer seeing Rachel Marsden, the saucy Canadian right-winger who started chatting him up after her Wikipedia profile came under attack. (See Valleywag's exclusive transcripts of their secret love IMs.) One hopes Marsden didn't learn about the split by reading Jimmy's love note online. As late as last night, she told a friend that she and Wales had patched things up.

In the statement, Wales claims his involvement with Marsden's Wikipedia profile was "completely routine." He also claims to have met Marsden for the first time last month. Shortly before their meeting, Wales reportedly sent this note to a list of Wikipedia operators:

In the past week or so we have struck up something of a personal friendship, and I offered to meet with her and give some feedback on her website design and business model. As such, at least for the time being, I may have a sufficient COI [conflict of interest] regarding this case that I should not edit the article or do anything "official" in my Jimbo-ness :).

Marsden subsequently told friends that Wales gave her feedback on her website design -- is that what kids are calling it these days? -- for 24 hours straight in a D.C. hotel.

Read more here.

The myth of Web 2.0 democracy

In a piece for Slate, Chris Wilson breaks down the myth of Web 2.0 democracy:

It's getting harder to be a Wikipedia-hater. The user-generated and -edited online encyclopedia—which doesn't even require contributors to register—somehow holds its own against the Encyclopedia Britannica in accuracy, a Nature study concluded, and has many times more entries. But even though people are catching up to the idea that Wikipedia is a force for good, there are still huge misconceptions about what makes the encyclopedia tick. While Wikipedia does show the creative potential of online communities, it's a mistake to assume the site owes its success to the wisdom of the online crowd.

Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.

The same undemocratic underpinnings of Web 2.0 are on display at Digg.com ...

Read more here.

Are you sure Corey Worthington Delaney is Wikipedia worthy?

Last month I blogged about the discussions as to whether the infamous MySpace party teenager Corey Worthington Delaney deserved a Wikipedia entry (see here), and it seems as though the debate is still going:

MELBOURNE teenager Corey Worthington, also known by the surname Delaney, is set to finally get his own page on Wikipedia after an earlier entry was vetoed by users.

A heated debate among the website's contributors over whether or not the 16-year-old party boy deserved his own entry in the user-generated encyclopedia took place last month.

The majority of users who voted argued that the Melbourne teenager was notable only in connection to an event of short-term interest, and thus unsuitable for an entry.

The debate was reignited on Sunday when another page for Corey was made and subsequently nominated for deletion – but this time around, the Corey supporters look set to keep it online.

Contributors in favour of keeping the new entry so far outnumber those who want it removed by 13 votes to 9.

"He's notable according to media all over the world (and has) 245 hits on Google News as Corey Delaney and 171 for Corey Worthington," said user Allstar.

A non-voting contributor said Corey's name had started being used as a reference to irresponsibility and teenage rebellion in Australia and information about the teenager should be available online.

"The name 'Corey Worthington' has entered the media vocabulary as a metaphor, at least in Australia," said user Orlady, quoting two stories from the Sydney Morning Herald.

"People who encounter his name in news stories like these and don't know who he is should expect to be able to look him up in Wikipedia."

User Mattinbgn, who voted to delete the original entry, said that the Corey saga was too trivial for inclusion on the website.

"Once again it is time that Wikipedia decided if it is an encyclopaedia or merely a recorder of mildly amusing but ultimately trivial events," they said.

"If this is kept, I look forward to articles on every dodgy used car salesman, nude wedding, school bully and fad diet that makes tabloid TV shows such as A Current Affair."

A final decision to keep or delete the new entry has not been made.

Read more here (from News.com.au) and see the debate on Wikipedia here.

Journalists and Wikipedia

The American Journalism Review discusses the use of Wikipedia by journalists:

It's unclear if many newsrooms have formal policies banning Wikipedia attribution in their stories, but many have informal ones. At the Philadelphia Inquirer, which cited Wikipedia in an article about the death of television personality Tom Snyder last July, Managing Editor Mike Leary recently sent an e-mail to staff members reminding them they are never to use Wikipedia "to verify facts or to augment information in a story." A news database search indicates that "according to Wikipedia" mentions are few and far between in U.S. papers, and are found most frequently in opinion columns, letters to the editor and feature stories. They also turn up occasionally in graphics and information boxes.

Such caution is understandable, as for all its enticements, Wikipedia is maddeningly uneven. It can be impressive in one entry (the one on the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal includes 138 endnotes, 18 references and seven external links) and sloppy in another (it misspells the name of AJR's editor). Its topics range from the weighty (the Darfur conflict) to the inconsequential (a list of all episodes of the TV series "Canada's Worst Handyman"). Its talk pages can include sophisticated discussions of whether fluorescent light bulbs will cause significant mercury pollution or silly minutiae like the real birth date of Paris Hilton's Chihuahua. Some of its commentary is remarkable but some contributors are comically dense, like the person who demanded proof that 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift wasn't serious when he wrote that landlords should eat the children of their impoverished Irish tenants.

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But whatever the verdict on Wikipedia, one thing should not change, says the New York Times' Johnston: "No matter who your sources are, when you sign your name, you are responsible for every word, every thought, every concept."

Read more here.

AFP is not a fan of Web 2.0

On Tuesday I blogged about how a UK lecturer had banned their students from using Google and Wikipedia (see here), but it seems as though academia is not the only sector to be concerned about using Wikipedia and other new media:

It’s one thing for Agence France Presse to ban its workforce from using Wikipedia content as reference material. It’s a whole other level of ridiculous to put the kibosh on Facebook citations. If reporters can’t tap the Web’s social networking space for fodder, what will the 24-hour news cycle come to? Madness, we say. Madness.

Okay, perhaps the tone of that intro there wasn’t exactly a just portrayal of the steps the AFP has taken recently in an effort to tighten up that journalistic integrity thing news critics have been carping on about for…a long, long, long time. It’s certainly true that both Wikipedia and Facebook have their respective problems concerning facts and falsities.

But for the AFP to prevent its foot soldiers from “relying on many new ‘virtual’ sources for news” seems a tad too generalistic a move. Rather, journalists – as well as their editors – should take it upon themselves to learn the ways of Web 2.0, and adapt their investigative methods to encompass modern Internet services. Shunning Facebook outright does neither the AFP or its readership any good.

Yes, errors have been made by journalists concerning authentication of Web-based sources, and they should be addressed. But there has never been a time when reporters ever relayed truths – and nothing but truths. Mistakes have continually been made since the genesis of the Gutenberg. So the issues raised over the need to clamp down on any referencing of digital material are really nothing to worry extensively over. As long as repairs to news records are made in a timely fashion, journalists should be open to explore most all noteworthy facets of the Web.

Read more here (from Mashable).

Is Corey Worthington Delaney Wikipedia worthy?

News.com.au reports on the discussions as to whether the infamous MySpace party teenager Corey Worthington Delaney (see here and here) deserves a Wikipedia entry and in the process gives a useful insight into how Wikipedia works behind the scenes:

MELBOURNE teenager and infamous "party boy" Corey Delaney has managed to ruffle a new set of feathers without even lifting a finger.

A heated debate among the contributors of Wikipedia took place this morning over whether or not the 16-year-old wild child deserved his own entry on the website.

"He's a d***head kid. We don't write articles about every d***head kid, even the ones who have been on ACA (A Current Affair)," wrote one user, who voted that the entry be deleted.

...

A Wikipedia entry for the teen troublemaker, created by a user called Fosnez, was online for 35 minutes before being deleted by other users.

The deletion sparked a debate among contributors to the website, a user-generated encyclopedia that is policed for accuracy and relevance by members of the public.

"Speaking as an Australian – can people outside this country actually tell what is important in another person's culture and then make the rules about deletion?" asked user Bebe Jumea after the page was deleted.

"His advice... when asked by the reporter what would he say to other kids having a home alone party – 'get me to run it' – neatly overturns the powerbase of tabloid television, so please think twice about deletion."

Original author Fosnez appealed the decision and said Corey had become a notable person after his out-of-control party was reported by news outlets such as CNN, BBC and The Guardian.

"This event may cause a change in some laws (or) policies in Victoria, and it would be important for Wikipedia to capture the context of the driving forces behind these changes," they said.

Corey's supporters were eventually outnumbered by contributors who argued he was notable only in connection to an event of short-term interest, which did not satisfy Wikipedia's requirements for an entry.

User Mattinbgn said it was also inappropriate to create an entry to document a single mistake made by an under-age person.

"Is it fair on a 16-year-old child to create a Wikipedia article on him about something that he may look back on and regret?" they asked.

"Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a tabloid and editors should remember their ethical obligations when writing about children, even if the press do not."

One user called Dihydrogen supported the decision to the delete the entry but admitted they were biased.

"Apart from the fact that anything that appears on ACA is probably non-notable bulls***, this one actually isn't notable," he or she said.

"Plus, I'm bitter cos I didn't get an invite :("

Read more here and see the full Wikipedia debate here.

Happy birthday Wikipedia

Yesterday - 15 January - Wikipedia turned seven:

In the 7 years since Wikipedia was publicly launched on January 15, 2001, the online encyclopedia has put up some impressive numbers. The flagship English language version now has 2,174,371 articles (as I write this), is the 9th most popular site on the Internet (according to Alexa), and has spawned 6 side projects (Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikisource, and Wikiversity).

Wikipedia's projects span over 250 languages, with 9.4 million articles, 1.5 million images, and 10.3 million registered users (75,000 of whom are active contributors). All in the public domain.

WikiCharts, which keeps track of the top 100 Wikipedia pages in terms of page views (the main page gets 53 million of those per day), shows that the most popular thing Wikipedia does these days is define itself.

...

Another fun Wikipedia tool to check out in honor of the site's birthday is Wikirage (which we reviewed in August). Wikirage keeps track of edits to determine the most popular (or most disputed) entries on the site. Not surprisingly, the most edited page today is that of the MacBook Air.

Read more here (from ReadWriteWeb).

Wikipedia for dummies

Thanks to this article in The Guardian, I now know about the simple version of Wikipedia:

The English version of Wikipedia, the online reference resource that anyone can edit, now contains almost 2.2 million articles. The French version has just over 600,000, the Polish about 450,000. On the bottom tier, the versions boasting between 20,000 and 40,000 articles include Bosnian, Basque, Vietnamese - and something called Simple English.

If you're wondering what the latter means, here's the Simple English explanation: "Articles in the Simple English Wikipedia use fewer words and easier grammar than the Ordinary English Wikipedia." It's intended for students, children and people who are learning English, but it's also used by people who find that the basic grammar and vocabulary "helps them to understand unfamiliar topics or complex ideas".

Article continues

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In contrast to the accumulative and needlessly prolix articles often found in regular Wikipedia, the Simple English version tends to stick to commonly accepted facts and rarely tells you more than you want to know. Lindsay Lohan's entry runs to just three sentences, one of which is "She plays the guitar very well and has done many singing parts." In contrast, the standard Wikipedia version of her life is 4,000 words long.

Simple English is based on Basic English, an international language devised by Charles Ogden in the 1920s, which is confined to just 850 words, and a Voice of America protocol for overseas broadcasts called Special English. Those writing for the Simple English Wikipedia are advised to limit themselves to about 1,000 common words and to avoid idioms and ambiguity of meaning. Of course, one could argue that certain of life's complexities simply cannot be conveyed in this manner, but then again, what you don't know about Lindsay Lohan won't hurt you.

Read more here.

Lecturer bans Google and Wikipedia

I must admit I was really surprised to see that this story - Lecturer bans students from using Google and Wikipedia - made news in the UK (via The Argus) in the first place, and was stunned to see it pick up internationally (see, for example, here).  I was surprised because I would have though almost all academics would prefer it if students used more rigorous academic and intellectual research methodologies than a few internet searches.  That is not to say that Google and Wikipedia can't be a part of research (indeed it is worth noting that both Google and Wikipedia may reveal to a researcher valid and interesting sources that more traditional searches may not), but simply that they should not be the beginning and the end of research.  While there is no doubt that to simply ban Google and Wikipedia is silly, it is equally silly that a sound-bite from one UK lecturer has made news all around the world.

Wikia Search gets the thumbs down from critics

The San Jose Mercury News has a useful summary of the generally negative response to Wikia Search:

Jimmy Wales, the famous founder of Wikipedia, on Monday unveiled his new project with an unusual caveat. He warned that the quality of Wikia Search, a new open-source search engine edited by ordinary people, was "terrible."

Across the blogosphere, pundits pounced. But technologists at leading search companies defended Wales and said his efforts could benefit the entire industry.

Michael Arrington, founder of Techcrunch, which specializes in reviews of new technology, said Wikia Search "may be one of the biggest disappointments I've had the displeasure of reviewing."

"We need 'human powered search' like a fish needs a bicycle," wrote Andrew Heenan, who publishes an Internet marketing blog called Seo2seo.

For Wales the negative reaction was all too familiar. His first project, an online encyclopedia co-written by anonymous volunteers across the Internet, was also scornfully dismissed - until it became a wildly successful digital reference currently boasting more than 9 million articles in 253 languages.

In an interview, Wales said critics of Wikia Search are missing the point. "This is a project to build a search engine, not a search engine," he explained. (The project is located at www.wikia.com.) Wales said it will take a minimum of two years before Wikia Search produces results as good as the major search engines.

Read more here.  So I suppose we'll just have to wait and see ...

Wikipedia: a community of editors or a community of authors?

Tim O'Reilly has a fascinating post on whether wikipedia is a community of editors or a community of authors?  Read it here.

Wiki-Government

Beth Noveck, Associate Professor of Law at New York Law School, has an article in the current issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas on "Wiki Government: How open-source technology can make government decision-making more expert and more democratic."  Read it here.

Web 2.0 wars

There are two Web 2.0 wars that have attracted some attention this week.  The first is Google versus Wikipedia:

Google is to go head-to head with Wikipedia, the web’s largest reference work, setting up a clash between two of the web’s biggest brands.

A new Google service, dubbed "knol", will invite individuals to write “authoritative articles” on their areas of expertise, the firm revealed yesterday.

As on Wikipedia, content on knol (the name comes from “knowledge”) will be free to access. In a departure from the non-profit Wikipedia model, however, knol's authors will be able to attach advertising to their work and take a share of revenues.

Google hopes that knol articles will cover “all topics, from scientific concepts ... to entertainment.”

Read more here (from The Times).  This is an interesting move from Google.  Although it is always hard to come from behind, if Google gives knol higher prominence in search rankings than Wikipedia it could very easily become as ubiquitous as Wikipedia is today.  The main advantage, however, that Wikipedia will have is its immediacy - as Wikipedia does not limit authorship, an entry can be updated almost immediately.  This will be a particular advantage for entertainment and technology entries.

The second such war is between Facebook application platform and OpenSocial (which can really be labeled Facebook versus Google):

Facebook is opening up the Facebook Platform Architecture,  "enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model". The social network site says:

In fact, we'll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms. Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve, but by enabling other social sites to use what we've learned, everyone wins -- users get a better experience around the web, developers get access to new audiences, and social sites get more applications.

This is already more than theory. Bebo, which is popular in the UK, has just announced its own Open Application Platform. This is, not coincidentally, based on Facebook. Bebo says:

The Bebo Open Application Platform will be the first in the industry to implement the standards defined by the Facebook Platform, an open development system that enables companies and engineers to extend Facebook's more than 7,000 applications to other social websites.

In other words, there's now a Facebook system that can compete with Google's misleadingly-named OpenSocial, which Google developed in secret then presented as an alternative to Facebook's proprietary system.

Read more here (from The Guardian).  This is another interesting move - this time from Facebook - and it likely seems that Facebook will continue to dominate the social networking world.  However, the New York Times blog Bits is right when it reminds us that:

... this geeky little battle is not central to the fate of social networking, despite all the noise. For now, all these applications are the icing on the social network experience. The cake is still the core functions –- the database of friends, communications tools, the news feed. And so far, there are huge limitations on what application developers can actually do: They can’t bring data off of social networks onto their own sites, for example. And neither system actually connects networks, so a Facebook user cannot throw a sheep at her British friend who is on Bebo.

Read more here.

Jimmy Wales to create Facebook competitor?

Matthew Buckland suggests that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales may be creating a competitor to Facebook:

At a gathering of about 100 of some of South Africa’s top geeks on Tuesday night, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales revealed what he said were some of the “first screenshots” of his new project on search.

But the screenshot that Wales briefly showed the audience looked very much like a Facebook profile page, than a search page. In fact it looked pretty much identical to a Facebook profile page.

Could this mean Wales is developing a social networking, Facebook competitor too? Could it be some kind of search/social networking hybrid?

Read more here.

"Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia"

An ongoing study by University of Minnesota researchers has revealed that only one-tenth of 1% of Wikipedia editors account for nearly half the content value of the free online encyclopedia, as measured by readership.

The results of their study are reported in the academic research paper titled "Creating, Destroying and Restoring Value in Wikipedia".  The paper was published in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Group 2007 Conference proceedings.  This is the abstract:

Wikipedia’s brilliance and curse is that any user can edit any of the encyclopedia entries. We introduce the notion of the impact of an edit, measured by the number of times the edited version is viewed. Using several datasets, including recent logs of all article views, we show that frequent editors dominate what people see when they visit Wikipedia, and that this domination is increasing.

Similarly, using the same impact measure, we show that the probability of a typical article view being damaged is small but increasing, and we present empirically grounded classes of damage. Finally, we make policy recommendations for Wikipedia and other wikis in light of these findings.

The paper can be downloaded here.

Wikipedia cleared in French defamation case

Good news for Wikipedia, according to the New York Times:

A French judge has dismissed a defamation and privacy case against Wikipedia after ruling the free online encyclopedia was not responsible for information introduced onto its Web site.

The U.S.-based Wikipedia Foundation, which is behind the popular compendium, was sued by three French nationals over a Wikipedia article that said they were gay activists.

Judge Emmanuel Binoche ruled that a 2004 French law limited Wikipedia's liability and noted that contentious references in the disputed article had in any case been removed.

"Web site hosts cannot be liable under civil law because of information stored on them if they do not in fact know of their illicit nature," Binoche said in his written ruling released at the Paris civil law court earlier this week.

Moreover, Web site hosts are not legally bound to monitor or investigate the origin of the information they store, he added.

Read more here.  It would be interesting to see how a similar case would play out Australia, a topic I looked at (with Professor Brian Fitzgerald and Hayden Delaney in "Legal Issues for Wikis: The Challenge of User-generated and Peer-produced Knowledge, Content and Culture" for the Murdoch University Electronic Journal of Law.

Using Wikipedia as assessment

Ars Technica discusses Wikipedia as an assessment tool:

The use of Wikipedia as a source of information for classwork has been widely reported on and has even happened in classes taught by our own Ken Fisher. But this may not mean that Wikipedia has no place in the classroom, if Martha Groom at the University of Washington-Bothell has her way. Instead of letting her students rely on Wikipedia as a source, however, Groom has turned it into a destination for their classwork: in place of a term paper, her students were required to create Wikipedia entries.

Groom, who teaches environment and ecology classes, presented her experience at the 2007 EDUCAUSE conference, which focuses on IT in the education environment. Her initial goal was simply to provide some meaning to the college-level term paper, which typically has an audience of one (the professor) before ending its career in a recycling bin. Groom hoped that assigning students the task of creating a Wikipedia entry would make the effort more meaningful, since students were writing for what might be a wider audience and with the intention of providing a general public benefit. She also suggested that the project would be a good introduction to the academic world, which focuses on the production and dissemination of knowledge.

...

The Wikipedia community, however, was not as impressed. One article didn't survive for 24 hours following its introduction, and four additional ones were ultimately deleted following extensive discussion, their contents merged into existing entries. Groom also noted that some of the comments in the ensuing discussions "were delivered rudely."

There were also some practical issues regarding the use of Wikipedia, primarily related to the process of posting in the appropriate markup format.

Read more here.  I'm interested in Groom's experience because I experimented with using a wiki I set up for the my constitutional law classes this semester.  The idea was that they would create entries and contribute to the discussion, in effect building a collaborative set of notes for the unit.  Unfortunately my experiment failed.  On reflection I think it didn't work for a few reasons.  First, it wasn't assessed (although it would have helped them for their assessment) which made it seem like extra work.  Second, although students are very familiar with accessing Wikipedia and other wikis, they were not comfortable with the technical process of writing and/or editing wiki entries (even thought it is really quite straight forward once you've done it a few times).  Based on discussions with students, I think this technical barrier was probably ultimately the more significant of the two.  Anyway, I hope to continue experimenting with wikis as an educational tool as I believe they could be utilised very effectively, but I need to spend more time reading the relevant literature on the experiences of others and thinking about the pedagogy of their use.

More on defamation and blogging

Two interesting posts from different sides of the world on the recent defamation and anonymous blogging cases from the UK.  In the US, the Media Law Prof Blog discusses "Defamation and Anonymity in Cyberspace, UK Style", while in Australia  The Local reports on two Australian bloggers who have found themselves in middle of  legal issues arising from their blogging activities.  The Local also has some links to sites that have more information on the legal issues arising from blogging:

• Club Troppo  which has a comprehensive post Feeling lucky? Bloggers and defamation liability; and
• Larvatus Prodeo with Defamation and the Internet.

I should add also that QUT Law’s Intellectual Property: Knowledge, Culture and Economy is close to finalising a legal guide to blogs, wikis and podcasts.  In the meantime there is an article my colleague Damien O'Brien wrote, "Blogs and the law: Key legal issues for the blogoshphere" for the Media & Arts Law Review (unfortunately only the abstract is available online).  However I also co-authored with Hayden Delaney and Professor Brian Fitzgerald an article on wikis that covers similar territory, "Legal Issues for Wikis: The Challenge of User-generated and Peer-produced Knowledge, Content and Culture" for the Murdoch University Electronic Journal of Law and the full text of that article is available online.  Note both articles cover more than defamation, looking at privacy and copyright issues as well.

"Is Wikipedia really a pariah of knowledge?"

From Splat! Blog:

There seems to be a growing number of media voices speaking out against Wikipedia. Academics are also quick to look down their noses at the online encyclopedia (which threatens to reduce their book sales dramatically in future years). Free, accessible knowledge available to all? What a criminal idea.

It’s worth remembering that John Wycliffe, who in the 14th Century became the first man to translate the bible into English, was branded a heretic and possession of his English translation of “god’s word” was evidence of heresy. The punishment was being barbequed to death.

A few centuries later John Locke earned the wrath of the ruling classes by declaring that every person’s mind was a “blank slate” at birth and education was beneficial to all people, not just the wealthy.

I wonder if the bilious venom spat toward Wikipedia today is not in some way analogous to these historical antecedents.

Read more here.