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.
Speaking very loosely, I think we can identify several sorts of grafitti within Wikipedia, just as I suppose we can identify several sorts in the real world. First, the articles themselves and normal contributions can't really be classed as grafitti. Second, even highly POV ('point of view', 'biased') edits, made either innocently because someone can't recognize their own biases, or deliberately by someone who doesn't understand or accept our culture of neutrality, are also not really what I would think of as grafitti. Third, we normally do not think of "sand boxing" (newbie experimentation) as grafitti, either. The link says 'edit this page', many people don't believe it, and try it with "hi mom", and find themselves shocked that it actually went on the site. This is not like grafitti -- no one tests pens in bathroom stalls and finds themselves shocked that you can actually write there (or spray paint on a wall). Grafitti would include: 1. Simple vandalism, with malicious intent (fuck you!) 2. Simple vandalism, with political intent (fuck george bush!) 3. attempts at insider humor (poking fun at wikipedians, wikipedians poking fun at ourselves) 4. trolling And... Well, this is just speaking loosely.