Just an update on Wikiville: I’ve tracked a couple hundred changes in the last few days. Very cool. And now if you want to know more about Camilla, Georgia from student’s point of view, you can. (I love the description of how to dress at school…)

So what are you waiting for? What’s your place like?
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Just in case you might be interested to see what a bunch of U.K. students working on wikis look like, I just posted a slew of pictures at Flickr. There’s also one of a funny looking car.
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I’ll be travelling a bit the next week, heading to Savannah, Georgia for a Saturday blog building workshop and then on Sunday to Bolton, U.K., just outside of Manchester to work on a very cool wiki project with 50 area students. Wikiville is the brainchild of John Bidder, and the idea is that eventually the site will become a place where students from around the world will be able to add stories and essays about the places they live. (Nothing like a big idea.) We’re also thinking that they could add links to multimedia as well, creating a rich resource that would serve as a potential connecting point for all sorts of creative work.

The 50 students who we’ll be working with next week will be there to brainstorm ideas, learn how to add content, develop the ethical guidelines for use, figure out the logistics of editing and whatever else we can cram into the time. We’re hoping they can offer ideas on how to market it to other students and make it grow. I can’t wait to see what comes of it.

So I’d love to hear any ideas you might have about how this might work. And if you’d like to participate when we get it up and running let me know. The idea that there are some teachers and classes out there ready to add some content could be pretty motivational to the group we’re starting with.

(Cross posted at ETI) It seems more and more mainstream media outlets are turning to Wikipedia as a trusted source. Take this article in today’s Washington Post, for example:

At the start of the season 30 ethnic Samoans were in NFL training camps and according to Wikipedia, the web based encyclopedia, it has been estimated that a Samoan male (either an American Samoan, or a Samoan living in the 50 United States) is 40 times more likely to play in the NFL than a non-Samoan American.

Hmmm…interesting. I think.

But isn’t that a really strange stat to have crop up in Wikipedia? So I did a little more digging. (I have no life.) That interesting little tidbit was added to Wikipedia on November 29, 2003 by someone going by the name of Dale Arnett who most recently has been working on (just today in fact) the Ric Flair entry, by the way. (For the uninitiated, he’s a professional wrestler.) And what do we know about Dale?

I spent a good chunk of my childhood in Chicagoland, both in the city of Chicago and in Berwyn, but I spent my teenage years in Paducah. After a convoluted path from my bachelor’s to my master’s degree, and an excruciating job search, I started working for Union Carbide in South Charleston, West Virginia (living in Dunbar) in 1990. I got “Dow-sized” in 2002, as I was one of the many people let go not long after Dow bought Union Carbide in 2001. After about a year working for a Dow contractor doing much the same work I had been doing, I wound up in law school.

I’m planning to take the Kentucky bar in July 2006.

Hmmm…interesting. I think.

So here’s the question. Do you think the Post reporter knows that he’s included information that is over 2.5 years old and that was contributed by a guy who has created Wikipedia articles on everything from Xenia Onatopp to Chik-fil-A to Kentucky State Highway 3005?

And the even bigger question…should WE care?

Welcome to the crazy world of socially constructed knowledge…

Tags: wikipedia,, literacy

One more quick wiki post before moving on to something else. Danah Boyd has what I think is the most articulate defense of Wikipedia yet. Here’s a snip:

I will be truly sad if academics don’t support the project, don’t contribute knowledge. I will be outraged if academics continue to talk about having Wikipedia eliminated as a tool for information dispersal. Sure, students shouldn’t be citing from Wikipedia instead of the primary texts they were supposed to have read. But Wikipedia is a stunning supplement to most texts and often provides pointers to other relevant material that one didn’t know existed. We should be teaching our students how to interpret the materials they get on the web, not banning them from it. We should be correcting inaccuracies that we find rather than protesting the system. We have the knowledge to be able to do this, but all too often, we’re acting like elitist children. In this way, i believe academics are more likely to lose credibility than Wikipedia.

As always, read the whole thing.

In case you didn’t see it, The Journal Nature compared 42 entries in Wikipedia to the same 42 entries in Britannica and found the each had four major mistakes, and that on average Britannica had three minor errors in each entry compared to four in Wikipedia. Now, from where I sit, despite the somewhat more awkward and less polished writing, the up to date-ness of Wikipedia is worth the chance of one additional minor error, especially since we’re supposed to be checking all this stuff ourselves anyway, right?
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Very few educators are doing more with wikis in the classroom than Paul Allison. (I think I’ve said that before.) While it hasn’t all been smooth sailing of late (see this post about some recent issues that have cropped up), Paul’s work is worth watching carefully because it’s really showing us what the potential is in a very transparent, honest way.

Case in point: his recent post titled “High School Students (and Teachers) Write Collaboratively on a Wiki“. It’s a major deconstruction (with accompanying screencast!) on one wiki article on “Latino Pride” that was created and edited by his 9th grade students. Here’s the type of detail you get:

Before the article gets to were we find it today, there are a few more interesting changes.

4161: One day, Andrew, a student who had just finished a study of Puerto Rican Independence movements, added a single phrase to section 4.2.

4167: Toward the middle of April, Emily adds her feelings. She hates people who make differences matter.

4171: Emily adds a paragraph to the “Joking comes back to you” section that Anthony had started almost a month earlier.

4178: Chasterie also adds her message about unity, including text, and image, and a new heading.

Really good stuff for anyone who wants to get a handle on what this might look like.

And Paul’s been doing interesting things on his blog of late, including a recent “jogcast” that he recorded while running along the Hudson River. If you want a sense of all the really innovative things he’s doing, listen to Part 3 of his jogcast.
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I was mulling over a response to the response to the latest Wikipedia ugliness, but now I don’t have to, thanks to Alan.

I am tired of the WikiPedia flogging going on- yes the issue is worth discourse, but it seems to be the only conversation now, and what is being lost in the wash, is the un-heralded, social software fueled human explosion that pushed WikiPedia out there, that created an explosion of information. So is only important thing to be “right”, “factual”, “trusted” as opposed to having a voice in the conversation?

The whole current discussion seems flawed in being polarized; it seems unwise to gloss glowingly on WikiPedia without acknowledging the flaws and inherent issues of mass written content, but it also seems unwise to dismiss the whole process because a smaller number of &$^%ing idiots are pissing in the well.

Can I get an “Amen?”

News is not good on the Wikipedia front. (Please, someone stop me if I start using battle metaphors to often around here…) Adam Curry has been doing some self-aggrandizing in terms of his Podfathership, and now there has been some character assisination going on that has really accentuated the Wikipedia problem. Because, you see, there are now a couple of seemingly reputable reference sites on the Internet that are snatching Wikipedia text verbatim (without human eyes) to answer questions people pose.

Oh boy.

Dave Winer says:

…the bigger problem is that Wikipedia is so often considered authoritative. That must stop now, surely. Every fact in there must be considered partisan, written by someone with a confict of interest. Further, we need to determine what authority means in the age of Internet scholarship. And we need to take a step back and ask if we really want the participants in history to write and rewrite the history. Isn’t there a place in this century for historians, non-participants who observe and report on the events?

That is the critical question. What does authority mean in the age of Internet scholarship? (I just want to ask questions today, not attempt to answer them. I’m tired.)

And so the disruption goes…

UPDATE: See this NY Times Lesson Plan on the Wikipedia woes.

I got an e-mail pointing to this post at if:Book that asks “Can there be great textbooks without great authors?” The basic premise is that the movement to create collaborative texts a la Wikibooks will never produce the quality required to truly replace traditionally authored texts.

The open source volunteer format works for encyclopedia entries, which don’t require deep knowledge of a particular subject. But the sustained examination and comprehensive vision required to understand and contextualize a particular subject area is out of reach for most wiki contributors. The communal voice of the open source textbook is also problematic, as it lacks the power of an inspired authoritative narrator.

The post goes on to discuss a portion of the Wikibook Art History that was obviously plagiarized from a very widely circulated art history text.

If the first page of the wikibook-of-the month blatantly rips-off one of the most popular art history books in print and nobody notices, how will Wikibooks be able to police the other 11,000 plus textbooks it intends to sponsor? Finally, what will the consequences be if poorly written, plagairized, open-source textbooks become the runaway hit that Wikibooks predicts?

Oy. It’s getting harder and harder, isn’t it? Which is why we have to work harder and harder to get our brains around these issues and figure out how to counsel and teach or students. And I’m struggling here.

On the one hand, I agree that the voice of one author will usually be more coherent and powerful than the combined voice of hundreds or thousands. On the other hand, the knowledge that hundreds or thousands can contribute to the text will usually be more all encompasing than the knowledge of one. On the one hand, it’s going to really stink if collaborative texts are just amalgamated rip offs of existing texts without attribution. On the other hand, if we’re good at teaching responsible research and attribution, that’s an easy problem to fix. On the one hand, however, it will be tempting to appropriate large chunks of copyrighted material, paraphrased and attributed as it might be. On the other hand, if we take the time to understand and teach Fair Use, and if we do the work necessary to interview and research our own sources (and teach our students that process), we can, I think, create something of value. And while it might not compare in terms of eloquence and cogency, what it represents in terms of an exercise in the collaborative attempt to negotiate truth and meaning may be worth even more.

Look, even the most eloquent texts can be a) wrong, b) irrelevant or c) outdated. None, I would guess, are perfect. Would Wikibooks be less perfect? Probably. But could we live with that, and as a part of our practice, could we teach our students the skills necessary to move those texts closer to perfection? Somehow that makes more sense to me these days.

But there’s no doubt, this is all more work for all of us.

(From Kairosnews

1. Write a craptacular draft full of factual errors, incredible sources, and grammatical/mechanical mistakes.
2. Post it to Wikipedia.
3. Wait a few days and let the community clean it up for you.
4. Turn it in!

Oy.

I’ve been a fervent supporter of Wikipedia and the idea of collaborative content creation, and I still am. But lately I’ve been trying to get out of the “echo chamber” and consume some alternative viewpoints regarding the things I hold dear. (I’ve even been spending some time at Instapudit lately…) The discussions over at Lessig Blog about what should be free led me to “The Great Failure of Wikipedia” by Jason Scott, which, to put it mildly, offers a contrarian point of view:

This is what the inherent failure of wikipedia is. It’s that there’s a small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the mass of triddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content generators stop being so and have to become content defenders. Woe be that your take on things is off from the majority. Even if you can prove something, you’re now in the situation that anybody can change it. And while that’s all great in a happy-go-lucky flower shower sort of way, it’s when you realize that the people who are going to change it could have absolutely no experience with the subject whatsoever, then you see where we are.

Now I know he comes at this from a content creation point of view vs. the content consumption relationship that most of us have with Wikipedia. But it’s an interesting read, one that has certainly got me thinking about my own somewhat euphoric view.
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Jimmy Wales (the creator of Wikipedia) is guest posting over at Lawrence Lessig’s blog on “Ten Things That Will Be Free.” Today’s installment is a free curriculum:

The second thing that will be free is a complete curriculum (in all languages) from Kindergarten through the University level. There are several projects underway to make this a reality, including our own Wikibooks project, but of course this is a much bigger job than the encyclopedia, and it will take much longer.

In the long run, it will be very difficult for proprietary textbook publishers to compete with freely licensed alternatives. An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with. The point is: there are a huge number of people who are qualified to write these books, and the tools are being created to leave them to do that.

And you can hear the chorus of “Butwhatabout”s from educators of every stripe who have yet to understand what’s happening “out there.” It’s like I tell those who are the vicitims of my blogvangelizing, it’s not that you necessarily have to use all of these tools (though that would be nice because kids need models for how to use them well,) but it is that you have got to get your brain to recognize what social, collaborative, easy content creation and publishing means to our classrooms and to our practice. It is transformational, and to not take the time to at least consider the potential could very well render you irrelevant in short order.

If you do read the whole post, make sure you read the discussion that follows as well.
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(via Steve Cohen) So look at the graphs, but get your brain around these stats about Wikipedia:

Alex Halavais has an interesting post about ways we might think about certifying the value of Wikipedia, and I think he gets it right when he argues that just assigning academics with PhDs or “acknowledged experts” to do the work is probably not the right way to do it:

First, that some absolute fools manage to get the doctorate. Some of these fools graduate from the best schools out there, and some of the less able programs graduate more fools than scholars. So, the Ph.D. is certainly not a measure of insight. Indeed, how many business cards have you received with the “, Ph.D.” after the name and thought that this was a replacement for any obvious signs of intelligence.

Moreover, there are plenty of brilliant people who will never get a Ph.D. The degree has a lot to do with a conforming to a particular set of social and economic conditions, and it is not the best learning fit for very many people. It was good for me, I think (still working that one out), but it’s not for everybody. And I have flunked some truly brilliant people out of our own program because I knew that while they were smart and able, they were not going to be able to complete a degree.

I do think that the average Ph.D., and perhaps the average faculty member, is an expert in their field and able to teach about it. But just as with the Wikipedia, that expertise is only most of the time on most of their specialized topics. The difference is that there is social acceptance of this form of authority. And the question is how to lend that authority to Wikipedia.

It’s good stuff, and it takes Andy Carvin’s recent post on student examination of Wikipedia a step further. I find this whole discussion hugely interesting and valuable in thinking about so many things: writing, information literacy, research, open content…

Last night at a pre conference dinner, Alan asked all of those in attendance to introduce themselves and talk about what their fantasy for technology was. The answers were mostly about the desire to connect everyone to this resource that’s becoming such an important part of our lives. And after achieving that access, I said my fantasy might actually be coming true right before my eyes in Wikipedia. I am still so incredibly inspired by the idea that thousands of people from around the world can collaboratively contribute to the creation of such a vast and impressive resource all the while asking nothing in return and remaining anonymous. It feels like such a gift, and feels like such a shift in what is now possible.