Wikis and the U Student
Clancy and I are both quoted in a Minnesota Daily article on the launch of Citizendium and wiki use at UMN*.
My point was pretty simple: While Citizendium is indeed the long-predicted fork of Wikipedia, I don’t think it necessarily dilutes Wikipedia’s value or core following. The hardcore Wikipedians who handle the primary production and management of the project spend a fair amount of their personal time on this because they are dedicated to the project’s core values: open access, open source, rhizomatic growth, and egalitarianism. They self-select and often describe their increased participation as a transformative process (see Bryant, et al, “Becoming Wikipedian”). Citizendium’s ethics of expert direction will demand development of a different sort of community with a different ethos and value set. And I suspect that the built-in requirements of expert approval and direction will slow production considerably, much like the problems that plagued Nupedia. (One would think it will still run faster than that project did, though, since Citizendium doesn’t require a multi-tier review process.)
The best possible result would be that the two projects would complement each other, giving the Internets two rich, free, community-driven encyclopedic resources. Given the players involved, that’s probably rather optimistic — Sanger has not been shy in the past few years about voicing his unhappiness with the governance rules and general quality of Wikipedia.
So we’ll sit back and wait. No matter what happens, this will be something that digital text researchers will be talking about for awhile to come.
* I’m never sure quite how to think of the Daily. On the one hand, it’s the University newspaper. On the other, it’s one of the largest university papers in the country, and the fifth largest in Minnesota. And they quoted me more accurately that some larger venues.
Comments
On the "I really don't have time to think about this" list--can you recommend a quickie overview of open source history/philosophy/whatever? I ask, because I'm always having to qualify the "NO WIKIPEDIA" edicts offered by other teachers...and I actually think students are smart enough to know how to use such sources...really!
Posted by: susansinclair | October 19, 2006 12:01 PM
There are several. If you’re really interested in *open source* (as in open source code for apps), then the Opensource.org definitions page is a good place to start. If you're looking for stuff on *open access* (free online availability of digital content), the Wikipedia page is pretty good. If you’re interested in wiki philosophy in particular, then Ward Cunningham’s The Wiki Way is what you’re after. And the Wikipedia Community Portal has all of their policy/philosophy stuff.
For what it’s worth: I don’t allow my students to cite Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia, because I want them to get out and about in the wild world of periodicals and books. If I wasn’t teaching Scientific and Technical Communication-y stuff, I might feel differently, though.
Posted by: Krista | October 19, 2006 12:23 PM
But notice that you placed wikipedia in the same context as other tertiary sources. And I like to use those as a first way in, sometimes, to a topic I'm having trouble understanding or narrowing. Like, when you first face a concept in some dense theoretical text, do you go read the original philosopher? You may *want* to, but a visit to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy probably is more helpful...
Posted by: susansinclair | October 19, 2006 3:12 PM
Of course I placed it in the same listing. That particular page is a good basic resource. I'm not inherently against the *use* of Wikipedia, or any other encyclopedia. But using it and citing it are two different things. I totally encourage my students to visit these sources to get a sense of the lay of the land, but citing them is a whole 'nother matter. You and I don't cite everything we read for a project, and neither should they.
And as I said, I'm teaching them to write scientific and/or technical reports. If I was teaching classes with more humanities content, things would be different. I don't want my dairy students citing Wikipedia entries on herd pregnancy rates when they should be looking at clinical trial results. But I'm OK with them looking up what the various fertilization methods are on Wikipedia and then using that info to conduct more specific searches in the library.
Posted by: Krista | October 19, 2006 3:37 PM