The next speaker in the morning session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Veronica Batzendorfer, whose interest is in the Xitter-adjacent Grokipedia project as an ‘alternative’ to Wikipedia. Specifically, her focus is on semantic drift across Grokipedia’s versions, starting with material drawn in part from Wikipedia and then rewritten by LLMs.

Such semantic drift can be examined through a geometric framework. This works with two points in time and explores changes between them, across Wikipedia and Grokipedia; Wikipedia content serves as the training data for the LLM which generates articles for the Grokipedia, so …

And next up at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library are Marco Wähner and Jan Dennis Gumz, exploring the further use of Wikipedia data on the early German federal election in 2025. Because of the unusual circumstances of the election, following the failure of the governing coalition, there was an increased need for information about the election amongst voters, and Wikipedia (as the only public-interest Very Large Online Platform classified by the EU) played an important role here.

But as a collaboratively edited online platform, Wikipedia represents a particularly special information ecosystem; editing activity here also …

At the conclusion of my travels in Canada and Europe, I’ve made my way to Lugano for ECREA2018. We start with the first of two keynotes, by Eszter Hargittai, whose focus is on the digital divide in online participation. The fundamental question here is who benefits the most from Internet participation, and who does not: do participation divides facilitate social mobility or reproduce social divides?

The key point here is that digital divides cannot be solved by mere connectivity: getting online does not equate to using the Internet effectively and efficiently. Rather, such uses continue to be moderated by …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Elena Gapova, whose focus is on the Belarusian Wikipedia. Nations emerged at a particular historical moment, supported in part by a growth in print journalism, and subsequent changes to global communication structures, including the Internet, were at first seen as a as undermining nation states; yet more recent developments – including Wikipedia itself – have also been understood as tools for nation-building and nation-reinforcing.

This has been especially obvious in the case of the 16 post-Soviet nations, each of which have had to reposition themselves as independent, distinct nations separate …

The next ASMC14 speaker is Heather Ford, who shifts our focus to Wikipedia. In its early days, the site was seen as an underdog challenging existing publishing models – this includes news publishers, and Wikipedia was seen as a challenger to the conventional gatekeepers. It was also shown that the quality of its content was not necessarily any worse than that of traditional encyclopaedias, even though it had been collaboratively compiled. Nonetheless, a persistent view of its inaccuracy due to this collaborative model remains.

Wikipedia itself offers a range of self-definitions, which inter alia point out that Wikipedia is …

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The final speaker in this session at ECPR 2011 is Thomas Roessing, who focusses on Wikipedia. His interest is in the politics of Wikipedia’s community of participants, which engages both at a meta level (on Wikipedia as such) and the discussion level (discussing the content of individual articles). Those two levels also interact, of course, and also influence the level of the articles themselves. Researchers can examine these processes by studying the records of online discussion for each article, which Wikipedia also keeps.

Wikipedia has its internal politics, of course, which are sometimes hotly debated (at the …