Folks,
>From Resource Shelf
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2010/03/25/at-university-of-denver-journalism-…
College students know the online resource of which they dare not speak:
Wikipedia, the voluminous internet encyclopedia demonized by many in higher
education—and a resource that two University of Denver instructors use as a
centerpiece of their curriculum.
Denver journalism students are writing Wikipedia entries as part of a
curriculum that stresses online writing and content creation as readers move
to the web en masse.
Journalism instructors Lynn Schofield Clark and Christof Demont-Heinrich
said students are told to check their sourcing carefully, just as they would
for an assignment at a local newspaper.
[Snip]
Students in the university’s Media, Film, and Journalism Studies Department
have composed 24 Wikipedia articles this year, covering everything from the
gold standard to San Juan Mountains to bimettalism, an antiquated monetary
standard.
Demont-Heinrich said the Wikipedia entries didn’t require old-school shoe
leather reporting—because the online encyclopedia bars the use of original
quotes—but they taught students how to thoroughly research a topic* before
publishing to a site viewed by more than 68 million people a month…
* We wonder if the University of Denver library, librarians, and library
resources were part of the training?
Sorry if someone has already posted this.
--
Keith Old
62050121 (w)
62825360 (h)
0429478376 (m)
For those in the UK who can access the BBC iPlayer, you might be
interested in yesterday's episode of a comedy/debate program called
"It's Only a Theory". The show is obscure, but not obscure enough to
not have a Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Only_a_Theory
Episode 7:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nxks7
That episode featured Andrew Keen (the second guest), who presented
his theory that "user-generated media is killing culture and economy".
He didn't mention Wikipedia (he was more focused on blogs and social
networking sites and free downloads of music), though at the end he
did bring in free culture as part of his argument (saying that free
culture can be damaging). A bit lightweight (the show is part comedy
part semi-serious debate), but interesting.
If you don't want to watch the Andrew Keen bit, the first guest talks
about the threat of bees becoming extinct or seriously depleted, which
is worth watching. For the record, the bee killing theory was rejected
and the user-generated media theory was accepted (again, the voting is
not entirely serious).
Oh, and that page I linked to has a 3-minute clip focused on the
segment "Is User Generated Media Killing our Culture?"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00542f2
Carcharoth
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Everton Zanella Alvarenga <everton137(a)gmail.com>
Date: 2010/3/15
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Trending Topics On Wikipedia
To: "Mailing list do Capítulo brasileiro da Wikimedia."
<wikimediabr-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Google has Google Trends, Twitter has trending topics, and now so does
Wikipedia. Pete Skomoroch, a Senior Research Scientist at LinkedIn and
blogger at Data Wrangling, built a trending topics page for Wikipedia.
The homepage ranks the top-25 Wikipedia articles with the most
pageviews over the past 30 days, as well as the fastest rising
articles in the past 24 hours.
More: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/11/wikipedia-trending-topics/http://www.trendingtopics.org/
--
http://blogdotom.wordpress.com/sobre
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Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
I'm new to this list, but I read in this beloved book I own that there has been an ongoing discussion that accounts created at the English Wikipedia will one day also work for Wiktionary, foreign Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects. How come that hasn't come yet?
Has anyone been following the way editing has developed on the
en-Wikipedia articles on the Haiti and Chile earthquakes? It looks
quite different to me. For some reason, the editing has tailed off a
lot on the Chile earthquake article (could the fact that the article
was semi-protected for the past 5 days have anything to do with
that?), but the editing on the Haiti earthquake article kept on going.
Of course, the Haiti earthquake (rightly) got more press coverage, but
our article on the Chile earthquake is not in a good state.
Compare the en-wiki article with the (es) Spanish Wikipedia one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquakehttp://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terremoto_de_Chile_de_2010
The Spanish Wikipedia one is a lot better organised and better
focused. The en-Wikipedia one is more rambling and fails to focus on
Chile and says a lot more about the tsunami warnings around the
Pacific (which is old news now).
There are suggestions on the talk page to try and fix this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:2010_Chile_earthquake&diff=3…
But I still find it surprising. It is not as if there is a lack of
sources in English (though there are more in Spanish), some of which I
put on the talk page which got zero response.
Compare with the Haiti earthquake article (which also had large blocks
of semi-protection, so that can't explain it):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake
Anyone have any idea why the two articles developed (and stalled) in
such different ways, and had a very different pattern of editing
volume and frequency? Is it purely down to the Chile earthquake
getting less news coverage?
Carcharoth
This is very interesting. Here is the abstract and link to full
article.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1565682
In a way there are similarities with Luca de Alfaro's wikitrust work,
in that this study also focuses on profiling editors as means to
predict quality.
>From the article:
We categorized the contributors that belong to cluster 1 as all-round
contributors since they were engaged in almost all types of actions.
Contributors in cluster 2 were labeled as watchdogs since most of
their actions were reverts. Cluster 3 included contributors who
created sentences while seldom engaging in other actions and were
hence called starters. Contributors that belonged to cluster 4,
on the other hand, not only created sentences, but justified them
with links and references. They were therefore classified as content
justifiers. Both starters and content justifiers, however, rarely
modified existing sentences created by themselves or other people.
Cluster 4 included copy editors who contributed primarily through
modifying existing sentences. Finally, those who primarily focused
on removing incorrect sentences, references and links were termed
cleaners. Thus, a contributor for a given Wikipedia article could
assume one of these 6 roles or could be a casual contributor.
Erik Zachte
Hi! On behalf of the FlaggedRevs team, I'd like to announce that Flagged
Protection, the proposed use of Flagged Revisions on the English
Wikipedia, is ready for more testing. We have made a number of changes
to improve clarity and usability for both novices and experienced editors.
If you have an hour or two to devote to testing it, we'd love your
thoughts. You need not jump in immediately; we'll be posting updates
every week or so. But we'd like it to be in the best shape possible for
the upcoming trial. Since we've been working without feedback for too
long, I expect this first week or two will be bumpy, but bumps now are
preferable to bumps later, so bear with us.
To check it out, start here:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
There's space for questions and discussion on the labs site, and I also
welcome direct email and talk page questions.
Thanks,
William
Credo Reference ( http://www.credoreference.com/ , formerly Xrefer)
has generously agreed to provide up to 100 free accounts to their
reference library (more than 2 million articles from countless
reference works), for research purposes. If you might find this
useful, please go to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Credo_accounts and follow
instructions to apply. There's a minimum requirement of 600 edits and
six months participation.
These accounts will be given on a first come, first serve basis.
There's no bigger underlying master plan - I've met with them a couple
of times, and they want to help.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/technology/15fedflix.html
"Duplicating Federal Videos for an Online Archive"
"Ms. Pruszko is a volunteer for the International Amateur Scanning
League, an invention of the longtime public information advocate Carl
Malamud. The league plans to upload the archives’ collection of 3,000
DVDs in what Mr. Malamud calls an “experiment in crowd-sourced
digitization.”
Armed with nothing but a DVD duplicator and a YouTube account, the
volunteers have copied and uploaded, among other video clips, an
address by John F. Kennedy; a silent film about the Communist “red
scare”; a training video on farming; and a Disney film for World War
II soldiers about how to avoid malaria, in Spanish. So far, nothing
elusive has emerged — but the project is in its infancy.
...
In red envelopes labeled “FedFlix,” his DVD-by-mail variation on
Netflix, the volunteers mail the DVD copies to Mr. Malamud’s home in
Northern California, where he uploads them to YouTube, the Internet
Archive Web site and an independent server. Mr. Malamud said that the
volunteer work hardly reduces the need for the government to increase
its own digitization efforts."
--
gwern