j's scratchpad

Maybe I should have warned you about this meeting, but I failed to. At blog group tonight, we’re doing a joint meeting with some folks in town for Wikimania. They by far outnumber the blog group participants, so we’re having some great discussions about Wikipedia.

I asked about citations in articles, which is something many of you are concerned about. They’re beginning to allow and encourage them. One of the men here is responsible for selecting featured articles. He says he tries not to include articles with no sources.

We talked a bit about the anonymity of Wikipedia authors. One participant gave the example of an author of a book about weapons who won an esteemed prize for his work, which later evidence showed he fabricated. Because his name is publicly attached to that book, people know he was the one responsible for the book. Because his name is known, he won’t be able to get certain jobs in academia because of what happened and because he’s now known for fabricating scholarship. How does anonymous writing in Wikipedia relate to this story?

We also talked about the “It’s a wiki. Fix it yourself.” issue. If people are unhappy or unsatisfied with something, they often don’t take the initiative to change or improve the article.

One participant pointed out that one of the values of Wikipedia and other foundation projects is that it’s free and has a free license for people to use it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Wikis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.