Content Sharing: Folksonomies

What do you think of folksonomies as a way of organizing information?

 

I agree with Weinberger’s argument that folksonomies are needed today in order to give the Western tradition of essentialism a good “kick in the teeth”. As Weinberger explains “Essentialism says that of all the ways of understanding a thing, one is its real way” (Weinberger 2006), while folksonomies (created by everyone and anyone) allow for a broader understanding of meanings. Therefore both the top down models of essentialism (such as dictionary meanings or library catalogues) and the grass roots models of folksonomies (created by tagging) are needed in order to create balance in the way information is organized and categorized. As such information is made searchable and findable for the layperson and the professional alike in both online and offline environments.

Is it free of bias or only useful to those who share a similar vocabulary?

No, I don’t think any form of information categorization can be truly unbiased, and as many other people have pointed out folksonomies are only useful to those who share a vocabulary. Different languages, different cultures and even generational gaps can cause the understanding of the meanings of words, to alter from person to person, although I do not think that folksonomies should be totally written off as a way for information categorization. As Mathes states the feedback a user receives after tagging an item is “ immediate .As soon as you assign a tag to an item, you see the cluster of items carrying the same tag. If that’s not what you expected, you’re given incentive to change the tag or add another.” (Mathes 2004)Therefore although people create their own categorization tags, they have the opportunity to fine tune the tagging to match that of the broader community, allowing for some general consensus, should the participant choose to partake in this part of the process.

Mathes, A.(2004). Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata. Computer Mediated Communication - LIS590CMC Retrieved from http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediated-communication/folksonomies.html

Weinberger, D.(2006). Folksonomy as a Symbol. Retrieved from http://lms.curtin.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_4_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_40430_1%26url%3D

 

Wikis and Blogs - Sharing Information

As stated by many others on the blackboard, there are many similarities between blogs and wikis as communication / collaborative models for sharing information. They both allow anyone with a web browser to publish content in an on line environment without knowledge of HTML, they both encourage others to contribute to the pool of information, both cover a broad range of topics - from news items to how to party with pet rocks, and both allow for the use of hyperlinking and referencing to back up information.

The differences between to two come down to (in my mind) the idea of ownership. A blog is owned by someone – whether it be a corporation or organisation or by a single person. As such the blog posts are written in a way that contains that entities knowledge and opinions. Others may comment on what is written but they may not edit the information directly.  Comments may be ignored by the originating author or taken on board or merely deleted. The owner of the blog has control over the information that is presented.

In contrast to this Wikis are harder to control and not owned by any one particular person or organisation. Wikis merely present information, and organise it. Any one can start a new topic, or add to an existing one – therefore the information presented in wikis is constantly changing, history is always updating and never set in stone.

 

Wikipedia is one of the largest wikis and states that “The ideal Wikipedia article is balanced, neutral, and encyclopedic, containing notable verifiable knowledge” but this not always the case. There is nothing that prevents people from adding biased, non-neutral, unverifiable knowledge to this on line database, but there are people with vested interests in topics that will collaborate with each other, to try and verify information and improve its quality as seen in the article Wikipedia’s Rapid Reaction to Outburst During Obama Speech. Jimmy Wales (co-founder of Wikipedia) encourages people to quality test wikipedia documents, and to fix errors (TEDGlobal 2006) in order to ultimately improve his product.

Overall I think Wikipedia changes the way we communicate, as it encourages us to be critical of the information we receive whether it be in on line or offline environments. Wikis on a whole also encourage us to work together to create and contribute to an ever growing pool of knowledge – to be active participants in learning, teaching and sharing knowledge, not just blind consumers of it.

 

 

 

 

TEDGlobal. 2006. Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia. In TED Talks. online video. TED Ideas Worth Spreading.

 

2.2: Wikis

 This afternoon I added my expert knowledge to a pool of collective intelligence and became an encyclopedic author. . .  So what did you get up to today?

In reality my expert knowledge concerned a character in a British rom/com TV show and my claims to encyclopedic authorship actually meant that I added a few words to a topic in Wikipedia. While Wikipedia is advertised as an "encyclopedia" it is also advertised as the one that "anyone can edit"  (Welcome to Wikipedia  2012) - no credentials required, no university degrees needed, no expertise - you don't even need to give your name, so hold your applause people.

In fact altering information on Wikipedia is surprisingly easy -after reading a few instructions on the Tutorial/Editing page I was ready to bestow my head full of random facts on a world wide audience. The problem I found was not in the web publishing (wikis by design are user friendly - utilising a combination of  wysiwyg software and a few basic commands known as wikitext enables budding authors like myself publish on line without knowledge of  HTML (Leaver 2011)). The problem was with finding a topic that nobody else had already written about.

So why do people volunteer their time to write wikipedia posts in the first place? (when they arent required to do so for university).

A report on The Quality of Open Source Production states that who people that contribute Wikipedia do so in different ways. Some become members and publish under their names or pseudonyms and do so in order to:

• contribute to a community,
• to gain status within the community by publishing quality information often

Others contribute anonymously, on rare occasion and do so in order to:

• part with some expert knowledge in a particular field
• fix errors
  
  (Anthony, Smith, and Williamson 2007)

Therefore the combination of experts, error fixers and "people who like to write encyclopedias for the fun" (TEDGlobal 2006) means that Wikipedia is on par with your traditionally and "expertly" authored encyclopedia such as Encyclopedia Britannica. Neither are infallible, nor 100% correct but one is not more correct than the other despite the differences in the way information is collected.  Both operate under a system of referencing sources which should be substantiated before using in an academic context such as an essay (Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia  2012).

As status within the encyclopedic writers world was not something Ive ever really dreamt about at night, and my current incarnation as a student renders me (for now) expertise-less (in the academic sense) ... my task was to search for errors or information gaps in a very niche (some would say trivial) market that I knew allot about .. TV. Study in a previous university unit had me set up a blog about television show of which I now know every detail - from plot to character development to script. Gavin and Stacey it seems, is my area of expertise.

I found a topic about one of the characters (Nessa Jenkins) that was missing a bit of information and added the following text to Romantic links part of  the biography section:

"Nigel Havers, Mohamed Al-Fayed (who tried to set her up with his son), and two of Gladys Knights Pips (whom she woke up in bed with in Vegas)^[1]"
  

Wikipedia requires that all info is verifiable and therefore should be referenced back to a "reliable source"  (Wikipedia:Verifiability  2012). This is where a little more experimentation began, as I referenced my entry back to the blog I created for the assignment (Nessa's A-Z) and wondered if it would be good enough as an encyclopedic reference.

The only thing to do now was to wait and see if any changes would be made to my entry. As Wikipedia posts can be changed by anyone it was possible that the information I had added to the wiki would deleted or altered in some way. People passionate about certain topics can add wikipedia posts to watch lists and monitor the information that's added, changing  it within seconds if they see fit. These changes can be viewed via the View History tab which I checked religiously over the course of the day with no changes made.

Four days later I revisited the page to find the information I added was still in tact and was feeling pretty smug that my little piece of trivial information was being accepted by the wikipedian Gavin and Stacey loving community. This was until I tested the link I added to the reference section, (the one that pointed back to my blog) and found it was not working. I had entered the address incorrectly. So it seems I was mistaken when I thought I had been accepted into the wikipedian authorship community and it was more the case that the info that I added has not been checked. No body picked up the broken link, therefore nobody is watching the Nessa Jenkins wikipedian entry... The cloud of smugness lifted... Lucky I didn't care about it anyway . . .

Anthony, D., S. W. Smith, and T. Williamson. 2007. The Quality of Open Source Production:

Zealots and Good Samaritans in the Case of Wikipedia. Dartmouth College. www.cs.dartmouth.edu/reports/TR2007-606.pdf (accessed 11/1/12).

 Leaver, D. T. 2011. Wikis. http://dbs.ilectures.curtin.edu.au/lectopia/casterframe.lasso?fid=691872&cnt=true&usr=not-indicated&name=not-indicated (accessed 11/1/12).

TEDGlobal. 2006. Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia. In TED Talks. online video. TED Ideas Worth Spreading.

  Welcome to Wikipedia. 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 11/1/12).

  Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia. 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Researching_with_Wikipedia (accessed 11/1/12).

  Wikipedia:Verifiability. 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability (accessed 15/1/12).