Wikipedia 360°

Anne Pemberton, Coordinator of Instructional Servicespembertona@uncw.edu

Rachel Radom, Instructional Services Librarianradomr@uncw.edu

The Good, The Bad, and the Anonymous

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales: “I get at least one e-mail a week

from some college student who says `Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I quoted Wikipedia.’ And I always write back and I say, `For God’s sake, you’re in college, why are you quoting an encyclopedia?’ I got in trouble in the ninth grade for quoting Britannica, you know?”

Discussion

WHO’S USING

IT?

WHAT IS IT?

IS IT GOOD?

IS IT BAD?WHAT SHOULD I TELL MY

STUDENTS?

SHOULD I ASK MY

PROFESSORS ABOUT IT?

WHAT ARE OTHER SCHOOLS

DOING WITH IT?

IS IT HERE TO STAY?HOW DOES IT COMPARE TO OTHER ENCYCLOPEDIAS?

IS IT TRUE THAT ANYONE CAN EDIT IT?

The “Wiki” in Wikipedia

Shorter form of wiki wiki (weekie, weekie) which is from the native language of Hawaii, where it is commonly used to denote something "quick" or "fast”

A wiki is a collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it

Wiki History

Ward Cunningham started developing the WikiWikiWeb in 1994 to facilitate communication

Named WikiWikiWeb b/c he remembered a Honolulu International Airport employee telling him to take the "Wiki Wiki" shuttle bus that runs between the airport's terminals

Initially thought about calling it "QuickWeb", but later changed his mind and dubbed it "WikiWikiWeb"

“World’s Oldest Wiki”

http://www.c2.com/

Wikis Out There

http://wikiindex.org/

http://www.noveltwists.com/

http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Wikis_in_Online_Education

How Can I Wiki?

SeaPort(http://uncw.edu/itsd/wiki.htm)

Free and commercial wiki “farms” for people to host their wikis:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiFarms

Popular wiki farms include SeedWiki http://www.seedwiki.com, PeanutButterWiki http://pbwiki.com/, and Swiki http://www.swiki.net

A common wiki “engine” which implements the wiki technology is MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki)

The Most Famous Wiki of All … Wikipedia

Wikipedia History

Formally began on January 15, 2001 as a complement to the Nupedia project

Wikipedia History

Nupedia, an earlier (now defunct) project was founded by Jimmy Wales to produce a free encyclopedia

Nupedia had an elaborate multi-step peer review process, and required highly qualified contributors

Writing of articles was slow throughout 2000 despite having a mailing-list of interested editors and a full-time editor-in-chief (Larry Sanger)

Wikipedia History

Sanger suggested giving the new project its own name, Wikipedia, and Wikipedia was soon launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on January 15, 2001.

Wikipedia in 2007

Wikipedia continues to grow, with some 5 million registered editor accounts; the combined Wikipedias in all languages together contain 1.74 billion words in 7.5 million articles in approximately 250 languages; the English Wikipedia gains a steady 1,700 articles a day,with the wikipedia.org domain name ranked at around the 10th busiest on the Internet … the Essjay controversy breaks when a prominent member of Wikipedia is found to have lied about his credentials; Citizendium launches publicly …

Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the 10 most visited websites in the world.

In August 2002, shortly after Jimmy Wales announced that he would never run commercial advertisements on Wikipedia, the URL of Wikipedia was changed from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org

On June 20, 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation was founded

Wikimedia Foundation ProjectsName    Launched

Description   

Wikipedia 2001-01-15 Encyclopedia containing more than 7 million articles in 250 languages.

Wiktionary 2002-12-12 Dictionary cataloging meanings, synonyms, etymologies and translations.

Wikibooks 2003-07-10 Collection of free educational textbooks and learning materials.

Wikiquote 2003-07-10 Collection of quotations structured in numerous ways.

Wikisource 2003-11-24 Project to provide and translate free source documents, such as public domain texts.

Wikimedia Commons

2004-09-07 Repository of images, sounds, videos and general media, containing more than 1,500,000 files.

Wikimedia Incubator

? Used to test possible new Wikimedia projects and new languages for existing projects.

Wikispecies 2004-09-13 Directory of species data on animalia, plantae, fungi, bacteria, archaea, protista and all other forms of life.

Wikinews 2004-12-03 News source containing original reporting by citizen journalists from many countries.

Wikiversity 2006-08-15 Courses, course materials, tests. Announced to go into beta testing, little has been officially decided on its structure.

Answers.com

Wikipedia in the News

Nature (2005)

Compared Wikipedia with Britannica Online 42 science entries blindly reviewed by

experts Results: Britannica averaged 3 errors,

Wikipedia 4 Britannica: Study had numerous

errors Nature: All entries were blinded

Britannica articles shorter; omissions counted against it

Economist (4-6-06): Study compares apples and oranges

Authorities not favored, even viewed with suspicion

Response: Do we really need experts for most entries in a general reference source?

Entries for pop cultural figures vs. those for great literary figures, scientists, etc.

Entry for Britney Spears longer than entry for St. Augustine

Seinfeld longer than Shakespeare; Barbie longer than Bellow

Further drawback of the Nature study: No comparisons of style

Delving In …

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html

Pros and Cons? Half Empty? Half Full?