WikiLove

Word of the day – WikiLove. Images of tie-dye and long hair are coming up.

The idea of WikiLove and the three governing laws of Wikipedia are positive aspects of the site. The three governing laws: Neutral Point of View, Verifiability, and No Original Research. Together the idea is that wiki pages cannot promote or be positioned by a bias belief, gender, and other such things. I thought this at least created a forum for fair debate.

Difference between traditional encyclopedia and wikipedia is that the former attempts to present the current state of accepted knowledge, whereas the latter attempts to present representations of knowledge. The best I understand this is that the communities associated to each wiki do their best to provide accurate information, but they like to leave open the chance that it may not by accurate, comprehensive, and that it could change tomorrow. No responsibility I guess.

Wikipedia is produsage as it fits the governing principals:
- Open participation – anyone can participate, although there is a socialization process that controls contributions
- Fluid heterarchies – dev process ultimately driven by content creation and community discussion
- Unfinished artifacts – Wiki is “self healing” in that errors are caught and controlled by the community. There’s a lot of reliance on community and the policy of NPOV to monitor the content. There really are not standards per se.

“The best articles are typically written by a single or a few authors.” From there a community develops.

Wiki leaves it open for communities to form and create their content, so it’s possible that readers could intepret a “fringe” theory as mainstream. Can’t believe Bruns called Intelligent Design a fringe theory.

Wikipedia is also different from the encyclopedia for its range of content. It is driven by “stuff that matters to people now”.

Critics of wikipedia point to the open user policy – that there is no standard for quality. Bruns points to the ability to look at the history of a wiki.