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)

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?

• 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.

• 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
  • Clarifying how not to use Wikipedia
  • Addressing institutions' views on sources, primary and secondary
  • Addressing Wikipedian's concerns on newbies
• 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, 2009

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