Monday, December 04, 2006
Another Wikipedia link
The Wisconsin State Journal published an article (datelined today), "Reliable sources?". This article starts out posing the usual question, "Is the information Wikipedia reliable?" then covers a lot of ground that has been covered before -- yet offers one insight I haven't seen in print before:
Not that I haven't heard this mentioned before: one participant at the first Seattle WikiMeetup shared that a friend of his enjoys reading these interactions on the Talk pages (and other meta pages) to see how people talk their way towards a consensus on a topic; in other words, how NPOV is achieved.
Still, as important as these discussions are, that's something that easy to forget when on is caught in Yet Another Raging Debate.
Geoff
Meanwhile, [Greg] Downey [associate professor of journalism and library and information studies at UW-Madison] said Wikipedia users also get the chance to see collaboration in action.
"Often I'll tell my students the thing about Wikipedia that's fascinating is watching the battles, watching the arguments," Downey said. "It's that transparency of seeing 3 people or 10 people or 100 people arguing about what's important to say about this topic."
Not that I haven't heard this mentioned before: one participant at the first Seattle WikiMeetup shared that a friend of his enjoys reading these interactions on the Talk pages (and other meta pages) to see how people talk their way towards a consensus on a topic; in other words, how NPOV is achieved.
Still, as important as these discussions are, that's something that easy to forget when on is caught in Yet Another Raging Debate.
Geoff
Labels: wikipedia
