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In the Comments
You have to learn to let go. The idea that books, magazines, databases or any form of information source can and should be kept for perpetuity is laughable. Items in a library need to be weeded and space is the major reason why. I know all of you want to keep your precious books, and I do to. But who’s going to pay for it, you?... — the other me
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April 1, 2009
A Wikipedia Administrator Tells the Web Site's Story
By now, if you’re even moderately interested in Wikipedia, you’ve probably had the chance to read any number of lengthy articles on the Web site’s meteoric rise. So why bother with a whole book on the topic? In the case of Andrew Lih’s new tome, The Wikipedia Revolution, the answer is simple: The author is a longtime site administrator, and he has enough pull in the community to get Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, to write a foreword. So, for all intents and purposes, this is Wikipedia: The Authorized Biography.
Let’s get this out of the way now: The Wikipedia Revolution (subtitled How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia) paints a reasonably rosy view of the open-source encyclopedia. In Mr. Lih’s telling, Wikipedia’s neutral-point-of-view policy “has worked remarkably well,” its “clinical, just-the-facts style” is “endearing,” and the site itself is “a spectacular success.” Skeptics and agnostics, beware.
But that’s not to say that this is a dull hagiography. Mr. Lih, who has spent time as a professor at Columbia University and the University of Hong Kong, carefully identifies Wikipedia’s technological forefathers (there are useful sections on the pioneering work of Ward Cunningham and the legacy of Usenet) and chronicles Mr. Wales’s less-than-auspicious debut as a Web impresario (his first dot-com project, Bomis, was best known for “‘a guy-oriented search engine,’ with a market similar to Maxim magazine”).
The book’s strongest sections, though, come when Mr. Lih, a Wikipedia administrator since 2004, uses his inside knowledge to shed light on some seldom-discussed turning points in the site’s history. Look up the entry for any smallish American town, Mr. Lih notes, and you’ll probably be visiting a page created by Ram-man — a contributor who made “the most controversial move in Wikipedia history” by dispatching an army of robots to build articles out of data from the U.S. census. Dig into the history of the otherwise unassuming entry on Gdansk, Poland, and you’ll stumble upon “perhaps the most famous ‘edit war’ in Wikipedia history.”
This is interesting stuff, in part because it demonstrates how Wikipedia typically lurches toward a better understanding of itself: Someone makes a bold move, a brouhaha erupts, and Wikipedians work through the long-term implications, often in painstaking detail. (A note to folks chiefly interested in the brouhahas: Mr. Lih spends plenty of time on the sagas of Essjay, John Seigenthaler Sr., and Larry Sanger.)
The Wikipedia Revolution closes with one of those gimmicky flourishes that have become increasingly common in books about Web 2.0: There’s an afterword that was written collectively on a wiki. Truth be told, it’s kind of superfluous. But the rest of the book is definitely worth a read. —Brock Read
March 19, 2009
U. of Manitoba Researchers Publish Open-Source Handbook on Educational Technology
Technology is changing the way students learn. Is it changing the way colleges teach?
Not enough, says George Siemens, associate director of research and development at the University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre.
While colleges and universities have been “fairly aggressive” in adapting their curricula to the changing world, Mr. Siemens told The Chronicle, “What we haven’t done very well in the last few decades is altering our pedagogy.”
To help get colleges thinking about how they might adapt their teaching styles to the new ways students absorb and process information, Mr. Siemens and Peter Tittenberger, director of the center, have created a Web-based guide, called the Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning.
Taking their own advice, they have outfitted the handbook with a wiki function that will allow readers to contribute their own additions.
In the its introduction, the handbook declares the old pedagogical model—where the students draw their information primarily from textbooks, newspapers, and their professors—dead. “Our learning and information acquisition is a mash-up,” the authors write. “We take pieces, add pieces, dialogue, reframe, rethink, connect, and ultimately, we end up with some type of pattern that symbolizes what’s happening ‘out there’ and what it means to us.” Students are forced to develop new ways of making sense of this flood of information fragments.
But Mr. Siemens said that colleges had been slow to appreciate this fact. “I don’t see a lot of research coming out on what universities might look like in the future,” he said. “If how we interact with information and with each other fundamentally changes, it would suggest that the institution also needs to change.” –Steve Kolowich
Posted on Thursday March 19, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [8]February 17, 2009
Collaborative Online Medical Encyclopedia Goes Live
Medpedia, a new online medical encyclopedia relying on user-generated content from anyone with an M.D. or a Ph.D. in a biomedical field, officially became available today. The venture, which has the backing of numerous leading medical schools, was explored in an earlier Chronicle article that takes a detailed look at issues for contributors and users of the site. —David Shieh
Posted on Tuesday February 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [5]January 9, 2009
Educause Names Top Teaching-With-Technology Challenges for 2009
Educause, the higher-education technology group, has released its list of top teaching and learning challenges of 2009.
The top five challenges were selected by a combination of focus groups, surveys of interested professionals, face-to-face brainstorming, and a final vote. The challenges are:
1. Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation.
2. Developing 21st-century literacies — information, digital, and visual — among students and faculty members.
3. Reaching and engaging today’s learners.
4. Encouraging faculty members to adopt, and innovate with, new technology for teaching and learning.
5. Advancing innovation in teaching and learning with technology in an era of budget cuts.
Educause officials say they will now begin soliciting a volunteers to collaborate on solutions for each challenge using the project’s wiki. —Steve Kolowich
Posted on Friday January 9, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [7]October 14, 2008
U. of Michigan Students Use Bluetooth to Help Blind and Seeing Pedestrians Roam Cities
A mobile computer that reads wireless transmitters, allowing blind people to navigate a city, could serve seeing pedestrians as well, students at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor say.
The students have developed Talking Points, an urban-orientation system, to give users context about their surroundings.
“If it caught on, this would be an effective way to tag the whole world,” Jason Stewart, a master’s student at Ann Arbor, said in a written statement. “Anyone with a reader could use it to find out more information about where they are.”
The system’s mobile computers, about the size of paperback books, read Bluetooth tags — on city landmarks and other points of interest — and convey information visually or aloud. Members of the Talking Points community can edit that information, which is stored in an online database.
The project is similar to others — including one at Carnegie Mellon University — but Michigan says its use of Bluetooth, voice-command software, and user-generated content sets Talking Points apart. —Sara Lipka
Posted on Tuesday October 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [4]July 23, 2008
Medical Version of Wikipedia, With Universities' Help, Gets Ready to Go Live
With the backing of some top medical schools, a foundation is calling on physicians and scientists to help them build a huge online encyclopedia of medicine, called Medpedia. Today the Medpedia Foundation raised the curtain slightly on their Web site, giving prospective collaborators a peek.
The effort is supported by Harvard Medical School, the Stanford School of Medicine, the University of Michigan Medical School, the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health, and several health organizations.
The goal is to have, by the end of 2008, a site that covers more than 30,000 medical diseases and conditions and 10,000 drugs, as well as medical procedures and facilities throughout the world. Articles will be contributed and edited by online collaborators, like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Unlike that effort, which allows everyone to contribute, Medpedia is only going to let certain people edit their content. Medical doctors, other clinical practitioners, and biomedical researchers can apply to become editors, and the foundation will screen and select them.
One wonders about those screening criteria, which have not been publicized, and whether Medpedia will require authors and editors to disclose financial conflicts, such as ties to pharmaceutical companies, as many medical journals do, so readers can judge potential bias for themselves. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Wednesday July 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [2]May 28, 2008
6 Degrees of Wikipedia
A researcher at Trinity College Dublin has software that lets users map the links between Wikipedia pages. His Web site is called “Six Degrees of Wikipedia,” modeled after the trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Instead of the degrees being measured by presence in the same film, degrees are determined by articles that link to each other.
For example, how many clicks through Wikipedia does it take to get from “Gatorade” to “Genghis Khan”? Three: Start at “Gatorade,” then click to “Connecticut,” then “June 1,” then “Genghis Khan.”
Stephen Dolan, the researcher who created the software, has also used the code to determine which Wikipedia article is the “center” of Wikipedia—that is, which article is the hub that most other articles must go through in the “Six Degrees” game. Not including the articles that are just lists (e.g., years), the article closest to the center is “United Kingdom,” at an average of 3.67 clicks to any other article. “Billie Jean King” and “United States” follow, with an average of 3.68 clicks and 3.69 clicks, respectively.
More detailed information can be found on Mr. Dolan’s Web site.—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Wednesday May 28, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [18]May 16, 2008
A 'Frozen' Wikipedia Could Be Better for College, Founder Says
Cambridge, Mass. — Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, has been outspoken about his view that his creation, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, should not be used in academic settings, especially by students writing papers. One reason is that any given entry “could change instantly and not have a final vetting process,” said Mr. Wales in an interview Thursday at a conference on the future of the Internet, held at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
But the popular encyclopedia may soon add a new feature that would allow Wikipedia entries to be “cited more comfortably” by students and professors, he said. The feature would allow a version of a Wikipedia article to be frozen and approved by experts.
The German-language edition of Wikipedia has recently been experimenting with a similar feature, though so far it has only used to flag entries as being free from vandalism rather than certified by content specialists. “Later, it could have a flag that says ‘This version is one that a committee has actually vetted,’” he said. “We’d still allow further editing, but if you really wanted a version that as of three months ago we had three Ph.D.‘s look at it, and they checked it off as being good, we may move in that direction.”
Mr. Wales stressed that no final decision has been made on whether or not to create such expert-approved versions of Wikipedia pages. “The software is evolving in a direction that would allow the community to come up with ways of doing that,” he said.
Even so, he said, in most cases even an improved Wikipedia won’t be as appropriate for students as other sources. “What I always encourage students to do especially, is don’t think of Wikipedia as a source, think of Wikipedia as background knowledge.” —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Friday May 16, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [11]May 7, 2008
In Wikipedia, Length Matters
A new study found that in Wikipedia, word count can be used to predict article quality.
Joshua E. Blumenstock at the University of California at Berkeley analyzed articles to see if he could predict whether an article was “featured” on Wikipedia’s homepage, which would indicate that it had received extra vetting from top editors to verify its exceptional quality. He looked at 100 variables that might correlate with whether an article ended up as a feature, including number of citations, readability metrics, one-syllable words, etc.
He found that using word count alone, he could predict with 97% accuracy whether an article was featured or not. Considering the full “kitchen sink” of all 100 variables only improved his accuracy slightly to 97.99%. The magic word-count cut-off seemed to be 1,830 words, above which articles were likely to be higher-quality, featured entries. Mr. Blumenstock speculated that the collaborative nature of Wikipedia may force longer articles to be higher quality.
Still, he wrote, “[f]eatured articles are meant to be ‘the best that Wikipedia has to offer’; these results indicate that they might merely be the longest Wikipedia has to offer,” he wrote. “The high degree to which word count can approximate Wikipedia’s elaborate peer-review process is somewhat unsettling.”—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Wednesday May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [7]April 23, 2008
Germany's Wikipedia: Coming to a Bookstore Near You!
A major German publisher has decided to sell print copies of a portion of the the German-language version of Wikipedia, the New York Times reports.
The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia published by Bertelsmann will contain summaries of the 25,000 most popular articles. It willl go on sale in September for 19.95 euros, or about $32.
Beate Varnhorn, the editor in charge of Bertelsmann’s reference works, told the Times that the book is intended to appeal to “new target groups, including young people.”—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Wednesday April 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [3]