Please forgive my belated response to the wikipedia editing debate, as I am abroad (lovely Harrogate, UK) and only on once per day (or less). I have been actively involved with Wikipedia for about 6 months, and have found it a good experience. I have been surprised by the accuracy of the articles (in general), the comprehensiveness of the articles (EB would never do one on Bronx gangs of the 1950s-1960s), and the activity of people in monitoring vandalism, sillyness, and fixing bad formats, etc. It's an interesting mixture of hierarchy and anarchy. However, I do agree that editing procedures are cumbersome once you want to put in formatting, references, etc. Moreover, it's hard (for me) to find the guides for what to do, and when I do, the guides (as for Referencing) are not as clearly written as I'd like. We need _Wikipedia for Dummies_! Having said that, the standard Wikipedia response would be something like, "Stop complaining. Fix it yourself." Wish I could, but I have neither the expertise nor the time. This may be Wikiblasphemy, but I wonder if a core paid staff of clear technical writers would be useful for preparing such key help tasks. Best, Barry Wellman _____________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology NetLab Director Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman for fun: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _____________________________________________________________________
On Feb 27, 2007, at 5:28 AM, Barry Wellman wrote:
I have been actively involved with Wikipedia for about 6 months, and have found it a good experience. I have been surprised by the accuracy of the articles (in general), the comprehensiveness of the articles (EB would never do one on Bronx gangs of the 1950s-1960s), and the activity of people in monitoring vandalism, sillyness, and fixing bad formats, etc.
Thank You! I believe that regular users of Wikipedia mostly agree with you. The "collective wisdom" demonstrated in Wikipedia is not an empty term. In fact we will soon start a project based on wikis used to improve the quality of "state-of-the-art peer-reviewed" medical information statements.
It's an interesting mixture of hierarchy and anarchy.
However, I do agree that editing procedures are cumbersome once you want to put in formatting, references, etc. Moreover, it's hard (for me) to find the guides for what to do, and when I do, the guides (as for Referencing) are not as clearly written as I'd like. We need _Wikipedia for Dummies_!
Editing procedures for accurate references is cumbersome due to the nature of the mediawiki code (the underlying code used by Wikipedia). Proper referencing in Wikipedia can only be done through one of the specialized parsing files, mostly Cite.php. That file adds 2 parser hooks to Mediawiki (<ref> and <references>, working together to create properly referenced footnotes). Unfortunately Cite.php is not part of the standard setup of wikis using Mediawiki and both its documentation and implementation are not trivial. The code (wikitext) needed by you, the wiki editors, to create references is VERY cryptic, making standardized referencing a tedious process.
Having said that, the standard Wikipedia response would be something like, "Stop complaining. Fix it yourself." Wish I could, but I have neither the expertise nor the time.
I believe that the only rational solution is the development of a standardized web interface used to produce properly formatted references that can then be added to the wikipedia entry. If someone with a very good knowledge of proper referencing is interested in this project, we could definitely develop such an interface in a short time and I would gladly make it an open service to the academic community. To see an example of Cite.php in action, you can go to http://lo- wiki.acor.org/index.php/Cancer_Health_e-Communities.
This may be Wikiblasphemy, but I wonder if a core paid staff of clear technical writers would be useful for preparing such key help tasks.
Creating clear language documentation for all the Mediawiki extensions is very time consuming! You are talking about documenting the mutiple layers of code using hybrid programming languages. For every added feature of mediawiki you add one additional layer of obfuscation, making it almost impossible to create easy to use documentation of the feature. Wikipedia with all the bells and whistles is like a programing language tower of Babel :-) -- Gilles Frydman ACOR.org
I will be the first to celebrate when wiki markup disappears; however, I'm pretty skeptical that this is a community-wide plot to dissuade the non-technical from participating in Wikipedia. :) Re: citation in wikipedia Yes Yes Yes! Wikipedia could do a whole lot better here. Citation is one of the most important practices on the site and there is *practically no support for it.* This is partially a matter of social practice; however, I agree that it could be encouraged through the design of the editing environment too. In fact, we built a set of mediawiki extensions in 2005 that basically works as a shared end-note style bibliographic database for the whole wiki. Each reference has a page where the quality/appropriateness of the source itself can be discussed. Every article that cites the source links back to that reference page. Likewise, the reference page has links back to every article that cites it-a reverse citation index. We did all this because I am working with high school students to encourage information literacy skills and specific academic writing practices. It would be great to see these kinds of skills encouraged more broadly. Unfortunately, my code is woefully outdated... Andrea Andrea Forte PhD Candidate, Human-Centered Computing Electronic Learning Communities Lab Georgia Institute of Technology http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~aforte -Andrea Forte (aforte@cc.gatech.edu) On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Gilles Frydman wrote:
On Feb 27, 2007, at 5:28 AM, Barry Wellman wrote:
I have been actively involved with Wikipedia for about 6 months, and have found it a good experience. I have been surprised by the accuracy of the articles (in general), the comprehensiveness of the articles (EB would never do one on Bronx gangs of the 1950s-1960s), and the activity of people in monitoring vandalism, sillyness, and fixing bad formats, etc.
Thank You! I believe that regular users of Wikipedia mostly agree with you. The "collective wisdom" demonstrated in Wikipedia is not an empty term. In fact we will soon start a project based on wikis used to improve the quality of "state-of-the-art peer-reviewed" medical information statements.
It's an interesting mixture of hierarchy and anarchy.
However, I do agree that editing procedures are cumbersome once you want to put in formatting, references, etc. Moreover, it's hard (for me) to find the guides for what to do, and when I do, the guides (as for Referencing) are not as clearly written as I'd like. We need _Wikipedia for Dummies_!
Editing procedures for accurate references is cumbersome due to the nature of the mediawiki code (the underlying code used by Wikipedia). Proper referencing in Wikipedia can only be done through one of the specialized parsing files, mostly Cite.php. That file adds 2 parser hooks to Mediawiki (<ref> and <references>, working together to create properly referenced footnotes). Unfortunately Cite.php is not part of the standard setup of wikis using Mediawiki and both its documentation and implementation are not trivial. The code (wikitext) needed by you, the wiki editors, to create references is VERY cryptic, making standardized referencing a tedious process.
Having said that, the standard Wikipedia response would be something like, "Stop complaining. Fix it yourself." Wish I could, but I have neither the expertise nor the time.
I believe that the only rational solution is the development of a standardized web interface used to produce properly formatted references that can then be added to the wikipedia entry. If someone with a very good knowledge of proper referencing is interested in this project, we could definitely develop such an interface in a short time and I would gladly make it an open service to the academic community.
To see an example of Cite.php in action, you can go to http://lo- wiki.acor.org/index.php/Cancer_Health_e-Communities.
This may be Wikiblasphemy, but I wonder if a core paid staff of clear technical writers would be useful for preparing such key help tasks.
Creating clear language documentation for all the Mediawiki extensions is very time consuming! You are talking about documenting the mutiple layers of code using hybrid programming languages. For every added feature of mediawiki you add one additional layer of obfuscation, making it almost impossible to create easy to use documentation of the feature. Wikipedia with all the bells and whistles is like a programing language tower of Babel :-)
-- Gilles Frydman ACOR.org _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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I am slightly concerned about referencing guidelines in that some forms of referencing that academics use may be forms of nationalism. I am a fairly new academic writer and have recently trained in McGill legal citation style which is a Canadian Legal studies standard. That said I have used the referencing guidelines at wikipedia and as someone who learned most of my web code by reading it on the web (i.e. Ian Steward of the U of T guidelines for html) I would suggest it just takes a little nose to the web window to get it right. I have started a few articles in the mathematics and psychology pages and found it much like writing for school but I was able to save my pages from deletion by scholarship after the fact unlike the traditional end of term school process. Is the founder of Wikipedia a porno capitalist? Did this fellow get rich with internet pornography? also visit www.anarchopedia.org for true anarchy in wikipedia this site has huge vandalism issues. Peter Timusk, B.Math statistics (2002), B.A. legal studies (2006) Carleton University Junior Statistical Clerk Statistics Canada Systems Science Graduate student, University of Ottawa (2006-2007). just trying to stay linear. Read by hundreds of lurkers every week. On 27-Feb-07, at 5:28 AM, Barry Wellman wrote:
However, I do agree that editing procedures are cumbersome once you want to put in formatting, references, etc. Moreover, it's hard (for me) to find the guides for what to do, and when I do, the guides (as for Referencing) are not as clearly written as I'd like. We need _Wikipedia for Dummies_!
That should have been Ian Graham author of books on html coding actually here http://www.utoronto.ca/webdocs/HTMLdocs/NewHTML/about_the_author.html sorry for the mistake Peter Timusk, B.Math statistics (2002), B.A. legal studies (2006) Carleton University Junior Statistical Clerk Statistics Canada Systems Science Graduate student, University of Ottawa (2006-2007). just trying to stay linear. Read by hundreds of lurkers every week.
Ian Steward of the U of T guidelines for html)
I would like to apologize for suggesting that the founder of Wikipedia is or was involved in pornography. I have no evidence of this and was only asking a question in a scholarly context. Perhaps my abilities at scholarship are not the greatest. Peter Timusk, B.Math statistics (2002), B.A. legal studies (2006) Carleton University Junior Statistical Clerk Statistics Canada Systems Science Graduate student, University of Ottawa (2006-2007). just trying to stay linear. Read by hundreds of lurkers every week. On 27-Feb-07, at 7:26 AM, Peter Timusk wrote:
Is the founder of Wikipedia a porno capitalist? Did this fellow get rich with internet pornography?
Peter Timusk, B.Math statistics (2002), B.A. legal studies (2006) Carleton University Junior Statistical Clerk Statistics Canada Systems Science Graduate student, University of Ottawa (2006-2007). just trying to stay linear. Read by hundreds of lurkers every week.
On 27-Feb-07, at 5:28 AM, Barry Wellman wrote:
However, I do agree that editing procedures are cumbersome once you want to put in formatting, references, etc. Moreover, it's hard (for me) to find the guides for what to do, and when I do, the guides (as for Referencing) are not as clearly written as I'd like. We need _Wikipedia for Dummies_!
participants (4)
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Andrea Forte -
Barry Wellman -
Gilles Frydman -
Peter Timusk