The final day at AoIR 2013 starts for me with a panel on conflict, controversy and aggression in online spaces in which Theresa Sauter and I also have a paper - but the first presenter is Heather Ford, whose focus is on Wikipedia. She has been involved with Wikipedia for some time, and has seen a substantial level of conflict (leading to article deletions and user bannings) during that time. Her paper here focusses on the specific case of a Wikipedian being stalked and banned.

Being a Wikipedian means being part of a peer-production community, which Benkler and Nissenbaum …

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is Jonathan Morgan, who shifts our focus to Wikipedia. His interest is in how communal values are expressed by participants on the site – for example around specific controversies on the site. His project examined the debates around the Jyllands Posten / Muhammad cartoons controversy; here, the editors who created the Wikipedia entry covering this issue decided to include the offending cartoon in the entry at first, which generated substantial debate.

The site’s professed aim is to empower and engage people around the world, and founder Jimmy Wales has echoed these sentiments …

Milwaukee.


The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2009 is Zack Hayat, whose interest is in active participation on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a space for collaborative content creation as well as for interpersonal interaction (for example through its community portals - or whatever they are positioned as in the various international Wikipedia versions - and discussion pages). There has been exponential growth in Wikipedia participants over the past years, but the number of regular editors has remained relative stable; growth has been mainly in less active editors. Some 60% of Wikipedia has been created by 5% of its users, as Jimmy Wales has said.

Milwaukee.


The next presenter at AoIR 2009 is Ericka Menchen-Trevino, whose interest is in the assessment of the credibility of online information, here especially for Wikipedia content, of course. Wikipedia is now a major source of information, and is used by many users especially also for health information, which is particularly problematic if users do not exercise sufficient caution in using the information provided here.

Ericka examined this by surveying the attitudes of college students towards Wikipedia's credibility; they were asked about specific information-seeking skills, and their actions in information seeking tests were also examined using screen capture and audio/video recording (using hypothetical scenarios).

Milwaukee.


The next speakers at AoIR 2009 are Susan Herring and Ewa Callahan. Susan starts by highlighting Wikipedia's well-known Neutral Point of View (NPOV) policy, but there has been little research into whether its content is truly fair and balanced - even less so across the many different languages across which Wikipedia operates. There is a sense that different versions emphasise 'local heroes', but this too has not been tested.

So, this paper examines the English and Polish Wikipedias. The Polish version is different from the English in that it is specific to one country only, and that there is a very specific cultural background of the language community (and it is also the fourth largest Wikipedia); the English version is the oldest and largest, and is authored by English speakers around the world (but with focus especially on US and UK users, persumably). The paper examined the entries for 15 famous Poles and 15 famous Americans across a variety of different fields of achievement from a structural as well as thematic point of view.