Talk:Future of Wikipedia

Background

• Wikipedia Timeline
• Wikipedia Scandals
• Wikipedia Vandalism

Potential Problems to be Explored

Unsafe @ Any Speed?

• Need to consider the very real possibility that Wikipedia is an inherently defective social-technical product that cannot be fixed by any means even remotely feasible given the present conditions of its existence.
• Technical infrastructure needs to be improved

Critical Reflective Self-Study and Institutional Research?

• The difficulties, if not impossibilities, of continuous quality improvement in a system that is hostile to critical feedback and resistant to the principles of learning organizations. It would be possible to make a very long list of previous efforts along these lines that have been aborted or gutted by the prevailing dynamics of the Wikipedian subculture.

• If crowdsourcing is so great, why does the Wikimedia Foundation need to hire professional strategic planning cum public representation agencies like the Bridgespan Group to do its institutional research?

The Laborious Way That Decisions Are Made?

• Process vs. Substance

Newbies? Editing Interface

• Is maintaining a higher complexity level in the editing interface a mechanism for quality control? (e.g. users needs to be at least nominally computer literate to be able to edit/operate within wikipedia)

Demographics and Gender Issues

• Numerous discussions of Population Models can be found among the articles and comments at the Augmented Social Cognition Blog # Wikipedia.

• It is extremely doubtful that meaningful statistics about demographics can be derived from database records and self-reports that maintain no real accountability of Person Data.

• Horror stories of massive deception in this arena can be compiled and multiplied at will.

The View (or lack thereof) of Wikipedia in the Institution/Institutions?

• Fleshing out references to bolster things?
• There has been a decrease in volume of editor base and outreach initiatives have historically not been a priority

The Quality Issue?

• Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia
• Using Mechanical Turks for editing
• Gate keepers

Online harassment or defamation problem in Wikipedia?

• Ron LIvingston v. Mark Binmore
• Star Wars Kid
• ReputationDefender
  • Maybe this is not a problem of Wikipedia, this is a problem in the internet generally

Solutions Looking for Problems

Getting Educational Institutions to Explicitly Participate

• Partnership Program w/ Schools-Teachers?

  Need to identify what benefits, if any, would accrue to teachers, students, or Wikipedia by such a partnership.

  zing! Are We Ready to Use Wikipedia to Teach Writing?

Just be sure to read all the comments, too.

From the standpoint of the purpose identified in the Cummings blogicle, I question whether teaching students how to succeed in Wikipedia's dysfunctional rhetorical environment, or learning Wikipedia's preferred style of authorship, which is difficult to distinguish from organized, sanctioned plagiarism, is of any benefit to students or to teachers. Wikipedia also has a tendency to be resistant to such efforts; I recall several instances of students having been assigned to edit Wikipedia and subsequently being blocked on the grounds that their assignment created a "conflict of interest" (a term of art within Wikipedia's idiosyncratic jargon which means something other than what an ordinary person would think it means). Kelly Martin 17:53, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

• so "Partnership" was thrown around incredibly loosely

• Getting students to flag hotspots (see flagging proposal)
• Getting students to learn about how projects like Wikipedia work

  A proper study of how Wikipedia works, and more importantly how Wikipedia fails, could possibly be of interest for students in social psychology, abnormal psychology, political science, marketing, and other related fields. Marketing people, especially, should be very interested in learning how to exploit Wikipedia more effectively. Kelly Martin 17:53, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

  • Clarifying how not to use Wikipedia
  • Addressing institutions' views on sources, primary and secondary
  • Addressing Wikipedian's concerns on newbies

    A recent attempt at a quality control study (the "NEWT project") on the treatment of editors perceived to be newbies by managers of Wikipedia's speedy deletion process was met with strong disapproval by the community. Wikipedia's community actively resists efforts, either internal or external, to examine its internal processes and behaviors, except when the purpose is clearly structured from the beginning to be adulatory.

• Keeping in mind all of this: Wikipedia school and university projects

Zittrain's highlighting proposal

Firefox Add-on like DisputeFinder?

Meta!Meta! Time Frame

HW due Jan. 13, 2010

• Go get your hands dirty in Wikipedia
• Rank biggest Problems
• Get Wikipedia Review guys to give us their thoughts
  • Hello and Welcome!