I think the case for the abuse of wikipedia working like graffiti only works if the metaphor is refined a bit - it's more like someone coming along to a community street mural and deliberately painting something out of step with the aesthetic and political values that have been implicitly or explicitly agreed on by the 'community' that is working on the mural. A bit different from walking up to the blank rendered wall of, say, a McDonald's and writing "ronald sucks" on it. In one case (the mural), the wall is constructed as open and 'writable' and in the second case (mcdonald's) it isn't, because of very clear binary distinctions between who owns the wall and therefore gets to paint it, and who doesn't. All of which makes wikipedia a far more interesting case, IMHO. cheers Jean Jean Burgess http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~burgess Reviews editor, International Journal of Cultural Studies http://www.sagepub.com/journal.aspx?pid=196 ISSN: 1367-8779 Creative Industries Research Centre Queensland University of Technology Victoria Park Road, Kelvin Grove, QLD 4059 Australia Phone: +61 7 3864 5603 Mobile: +61 401 733 755 On 22/04/2006, at 10:41 PM, Andrea Forte wrote:
The "graffiti" on Wikipedia is definitely defacement. There are rules that govern activity on Wikipedia, often vandals act in violation of them. Contributions to the encyclopedia are not graffiti--that's just painting a wall. ;-) I don't think it would be terribly difficult to study the kinds of defacement that happen on Wikipedia. I also think it would be interesting to know more about why and when people vandalize as the site is charged with a lot of political and social meaning for different people.
Andrea
On Thu, 20 Apr 2006, Ariel Foina wrote:
I believe that the most acurate real manifestation of this "online grafitti"the the website defacement. Otherwise, any communal webpage infrastructure will fit the graffiti Idea. But, the point it that off-line grafitti is, fundamentaly a kind of ILEGAL social deviance, the owner of the walls don't want the graffiti ink in it. I don't think that wikipedia has somethin iligal to itself in its context, I don't think that wikipedia walls don't want to be furfil of content. MAYBE, when someone post deliberately, false contet on wikipedia, this could be seen as a king of grafitti, but I'm affreid that this would be a very dificul scietific object to investigate.
Best Regards
Ariel
On 4/20/06, Alex Halavais <halavais@gmail.com> wrote:
:). I defined Wikipedia as a "temple built out of grafitti" for a reporter doing a story on accuracy and wikipedia (see http://theory.isthereason.com/?p=810).
- Alex
On 4/20/06, Andrea Forte <aforte@cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
On Thu, 20 Apr 2006, M.B.Gaved wrote:
sounds interesting. Like Cameron, I'd ask about what definition you
have for "online graffitti"
<snip>
- defacement of existing online content?
By this definition, Wikipedia has a rich history of textual "graffiti." :-) Actually, I don't know much about graffiti, but it seems that there are many kinds present in Wikipedia, from the "kilroy was here" variety, to malicious defacing, to elaborate and sometimes pretty or interesting little stories and passages that simply don't belong.
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