By drawing on interviews with 16 users of the English, French and German language versions of the Wikipedia, my brief talk at Wikiwars explored the hidden layer of the translingual. In the interviews I included users with different roles as well as user with different translingual experiences. Continue reading
:::: start of the CPoV debate(s)
5 JanIn a bit more than a week, the first event of the Wikipedia research initiative will start. This debate likes to be understood as a critical debate which locates itself outside of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation; this debate wants to be a forum which is not ‘anti’ but reflective. CPoV means Critical Point of Views in plural and that is why not only scholars, researchers but also practitioners, artists and users are invited to present and discuss their views. I am looking very much forward!!
:::: wikipedia’s display of the offline space
7 DecMark Graham has mapped about the half a million geotagged Wikipedia articles (regardless which language version) and presents the rather unsurprinsing finding, that there is an uneven construction of the world in the Wikipedia online space. The country most tags refer to is the United States, in contrast almost all countries of Africa are almost invisible on Wikipedia in terms of geotagging. Also, he states a clear Global South/North divide. Against this backdrop, Graham daws a sober-critical conclusion:
:::: where are the point of views?
8 OctThis question is currently asking Mike on the Wikimedia’s foundation list:
I will just start with the articles that have not been deleted, and work with the deleted contents from the existing revisions. The data for existing articles that has been culled out should be a good starting point. When we have a list of all the editors from a certain POV, and they have all asked for thier deleted data then we should have the needed material. (Mike on foundation-l Digest, Vol 67, Issue 10)
Mike would like to set up a what he calls the ‘Deletopedia‘. He invites wikipedians to a petition calling for making available the single user’s deleted contribution to them. A clarification of his petition, you find here: http://undeletewikipedia.blogspot.com
:::: contributing to wikipedia: ‘a mixed bag of anger, frustration & enjoyment’
28 Sep
Jimmy Wales himself shared some self-critical thought on this year’s Wikimania by summarzing the development of decreasing newcomers with the words “maybe we lost the spirit of welcoming people”.
In a Facebook posting Geert Lovink talks about his student project that sought for critical Wikipedia research. He reflected “[t]he assignment also to write a new Wikipedia in a preferred language…. Surprisingly, with the exception of 1 or 2, students had never contributed to Wikipedia. As you can read, their experiences were a mixed bag of anger, frustration and enjoyment after initial bewilderment how complicated it all was. The Wikipedia interface seems outdated and overly complicated. And Dutch editors seem particularly rude in comparison to the English.”
TransnationalSpaces.DoingPublic 