[Air-L] in defense of wiki vandalism....

[phoebe ayers]

Just a small correction... Brion Vibber is far from a former editor;
he's actually the current CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, responsible
for technical maintenance of the servers and MediaWiki. He's made
comments in the past about how Wikipedia is like a giant MMORPG for
some users -- but it's as someone intimately familiar with how
Wikipedia works inside and out.

My own view is of course Wikipedia is entertaining to work on --
that's a big part of why so many people devote so many hours to it.
But you are very right that those people are self-selected. On the
other hand, the argument can be made that academics (and everyone,
really) should have a responsibility to help keep up Wikipedia in
their subject area. When students work on Wikipedia they have the
potential to mess around in the real world and cause difficulties for
the site, but also to make more of a difference than they would with
any assignment like a paper that would never leave the classroom. That
can be inspiring to many students. It just takes a lot of preparation
on the part of everyone involved (see the Murray essay I posted in my
last message).

-- Phoebe

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 3:09 PM, Margie Borschke
<margieborschke at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> It strikes me as almost appropriate that students who are required to edit a
> Wikipedia entry as part of a class, ended up vandalizing pages. I think you
> could argue that it is a valid response to being forced into public
> participation, particularly in the context of a self-organising community
> where all the other participants are self selected.  If you'd not  edited
> Wikipedia before,  wouldn't boundaries be the first thing you'd want to
> test?  What would Cartman do?
> I assure you he's not going to try the sandbox first.
>
> I think a lot of  students would also 'get' that in addition to being a
> knowledge resource, wikipedia is also a kind of game, something former
> Wikipedia editor  Brion Vibber pointed out in Nicholson Baker's NY Review of
> Books article, The Charms of Wikipedia.
>
> While there are clearly good pedagogical uses of Wikipedia, required editing
> makes me uneasy. It's not so great for students to have to learn in public
> and not so great for the people participating to have a group of students
> descend upon them either.
>
> --Margie Borschke
> _______________________________________________
> The Air-L at 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
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
>