My project is on wikis. I think a natural place to start is Wikipedia. For many of us, we may think of Wikipedia as the "original" wiki. (I don't think this is true, as I discovered that anyone can get the same software that is used to run Wikipedia to use for their own wiki). If anything, it at least was the first very popular wiki. My first bookmark selected is a link to a Wall Street Journal article on Wikipedia. The article states that a new study has discovered that only 13% of Wikipedia contributors are women!!!
To me, this was mind-blowing. I think this calls to mind a greater point about wikis and information on the internet in general. At any time when we're looking at information obtained on the internet, such as on a wiki, we need to ask ourselves, 1) WHO provided this information? and 2) What is their motivation? As we obtain information we may be taking for granted that the perspectives or viewpoints of some major groups may be missing, (like WOMEN,) or that who ever is providing the information may be pushing a particular agenda, (and the information is not as objective as it may lead you to believe).
An interesting related bookmark I added was for a site called the Wikipedia Knowledge Dump. This is a site which "saves" entries from Wikipedia that have been rejected by Wikipedia admins and may soon be deleted. You can see why a lot of this stuff is up for link deletion. Some is on the inappropiate side, some is just trivial information; stuff that no one would seemingly be interested in reading. Or would they? Who gets to decide what is worthy information? As the site proclaims, (which actually reroutes you to a blog,) "one man's trash is anothe man's treasure."
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
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