[Air-l] Wikipedia's Technological Obscurification: Three ways Wikipedia keeps 99% of the population from participating

[Martin Garthwaite]

Jason's view is interesting, but I feel that an extreme view of the
situation has been taken and open to critical debate; and to draw the
conclusions that he does, certainly needs further research.

My research interests are media literacy in a new media world, and in the
context that Jason looks at i.e. the code / markup language that Wikipedia
uses. I'm particularly interested in how people appropriate these literacy's
and skills.

To say that this code is a barrier to participation is partially true, but I
would argue any language is a barrier to participation.

Wikipedia is an open project and I'm sure that if there was the need to
create an editor some enterprising individual or group would create
something perhaps as a firefox plug in (as firefox is also extremely open).

Is this a classic supply and demand question? Is there so little interest in
such an editor that one has created one? Clearly the size of the wikipedia
project is so large that using the code and mark up has not stopped a lot of
people participating.

Martin Garthwaite

On 2/24/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> It is important to know that Jason Calacanis' views on Wikipedia are
> shockingly at odds with the truth in almost all cases.
>
> Bonnie Nardi wrote:
> > Very interesting. Thanks so much for letting us know of this
> > perspective on Wikipedia. It seems a bit like mashups which also are
> > not really for the common human although they are of course very
> > useful.
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > --
> >
> > Bonnie
> >
> > Bonnie A. Nardi
> > School of Information and Computer Sciences
> > University of California, Irvine
> > Irvine, CA 92697-3440
> > (949) 824-6534
> > www.artifex.org/~bonnie/
> >
> > On Feb 21, 2007, at 5:38 AM, Jeremy Hunsinger wrote:
> >
> >> this is an interesting short critique of wikipedia, and to some
> >> extent most wikiwikiweb systems that some of you may be interested in.
> >>
> >> http://www.calacanis.com/2007/02/20/technological-obscurification-
> >> three-ways-wikipedia-keeps-99-of/
> >> Jeremy Hunsinger
> >> () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail
> >> /\ - against microsoft attachments
> >>
> >> http://www.aoir.org The Association of Internet Researchers
> >> http://www.stswiki.org/ stswiki
> >> http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/  LI-the journal
> >> http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/  Transdisciplinary
> >> Studies:the book series
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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-- 
Martin Garthwaite

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