Wikipedia

Milwaukee.
The final AoIR 2009 session for the day is on Wikipedia (hmm, so few papers on Wikipedia at this conference - why? just because Twitter is the Next Big Thing now?). We begin with Lindsay Fullerton, who notes the trends in Wikipedia which have been able to be observed over the past few years. In particular, edits of Wikipedia policy texts have substantially increased over time, to the point where there is now more work on Wikipedia policy edits than on actual articles; additionally, of course, there has been a massive growth of Wikipedia editors, levelling off now and standing at around 180,000.

Copenhagen.
After some drama getting here (note to self: Qantas may be in trouble at the moment, but avoid Scandinavian Airlines like the plague), I'm now in Copenhagen, and we're about to start the programme proper of the ninth annual Association of Internet Researchers conference. Although the presentation by Dr. Hala-Seuss which runs in a parallel session was very tempting, I'm starting the day in a session on wikis. Timme Bisgaard Munk is the first presenter, presenting on his study of the Danish Wikipedia.

Singapore.
We're still in the first paper session at ISEA 2008 - but I'll start a new post for the next three presentations. The next speaker is Konrad Becker, who has previously published the Tactical Reality Dictionary and is now working on a Strategic Reality Dictionary to complement it. He notes that tactical media spontaneity nonetheless relies on the availability of underlying infrastructures, raising questions around the strategic dimension. Tactics are more strongly related to temporal considerations, strategies to spatial issues. Konrad now shows a matrix tracing different combinations of space and time, and points to scientific understandings of time and space.

Over the last week or so, there have been quite a few responses to a recent talk by Clay Shirky in which he discusses our collective "cognitive surplus" that is now being harnessed by participatory, Web 2.0, produsage initiatives. Shirky's talk has been praised by some, and condemned by others; negative responses seem to focus especially on his apparent disdain for television, which he describes as a kind of "cognitive heatsink", dispersing surplus cognitive energy. (Skip to about 1:50 in the video below.)

Another quick rumination in response to the Vibewire e-Festival of Ideas discussions. This connects very directly to my research for my latest book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage - chapters 5 through 8, on Wikipedia, folksonomies, and related issues around knowledge management and knowledge organisation, all deal in some detail with the question of how to come to an arrangement between 'folks' and 'experts' which both respects expert knowledge and asserts the equipotentiality of contributors who are not certified experts. Here's what I wrote on that point - comments welcome!

It's interesting that the question of experts is coming up here - it's something I've thought a lot about recently, especially also in relation to the Wikipedia where that problem has been a point of ongoing discussion. There are plenty of good arguments in either direction here (let experts have far greater say than average people vs. follow the common-sense consensus of everyone) - personally, my preference would be for a middle way which respects expert knowledge but also doesn't accept it unquestioningly just because someone has a degree and a position of authority.

I've just posted another contribution to the ongoing discussion on the Vibewire e-Festival Ideas forum. This was triggered by discussion about the New Zealand Greens' use of wiki technology to develop their policy platform, and the perhaps overly enthusiastic endorsement of this model from some of the contributors on the forum. In response, I suggest a somewhat more nuanced view of what contribution wikis and other open produsage approaches might be able to make.

Well if a bunch of people are writing policy together on a wiki it's better policy in that it's a better representation of what the group wants because its written by everyone, rather than one or two people who may filter what other people want.

OK, I'm going to take issue with this statement, at least in this very general formulation (which has quite a techno-determinist ring to it - it sounds like you're saying that policy written using wikis is automatically better/more representative policy because wikis were used in writing it).

I agree that this can be the result, but whether it is or not depends crucially on the dynamics of the the group of people participating in the process. Wiki-based projects are no more and no less subject to groupthink, flamewars, and conceptual blind spots than any other collaborative content development projects. Whether they 'work' or not (that is, capture a wide range of views and achieve a consensus that most contributors can live with) depends on whether there's an active desire (driven by the community of contributors) to listen to, engage with, and come to a consensus with these diverse views.

Vancouver.
We're in the final keynote for AoIR 2007 already (I missed the morning session this Saturday as I was having breakfast with Henry Jenkins this morning) - the keynote speaker today is John Willinsky from the Public Knowledge Project. He begins by noting issues of civic participation and access to knowledge as a key question of today, and relates these especially also to academic publishing: 'you make all the content, they take all the wealth' also applies in this environment, and the moral economy of academic work must be carefully considered. Fan writing, fans going public with their work - something that Henry Jenkins talked about yesterday - also translates into important challenges for academics: we, too, should aim to make our work more public, and connect it to wider civic concerns. This goes well beyond questions of technologies of access and distribution - it requires a shift of thinking; we need to 'get in the game', to allude to the 'Let's Play' theme of this conference.

There's been a certain amount of publicity recently for Andrew Keen's book The Cult of the Amateur, which roundly criticises citizen journalism, Wikipedia, and pretty much anything else associated with 'Web 2.0' and user-led content creation for 'killing our culture'. Looks like it's striking all the right chords with the usual moral panic crowd who find it hard to accept that anyone but themselves could be in charge of determining what's good and worthy - or indeed, that users themselves, as the participants in culture, might want to have a say in such decisions.

Keen's one-man cultural crusade is reminiscent of the Discovery Institute's 'Teach the Controversy' campaign against the science of evolution, which similarly relies on clever marketing to disguise the fundamental flaws of its 'scientific theory' of intelligent design; or in a related comparison, he's establishing himself as the media industry equivalent of a climate change denialist, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to discredit his overgeneralised hyperbole. Some industrial journalists, of course, love anything which attempts to take the shine off their citizen counterparts. So, I was reasonably concerned what I saw Keen pop up in the weeknightly podcast of the BBC's NewsNight programme - but thankfully, they had Charles Leadbeater at hand to inject some reason into the debate:

[NewsNight video at the BBC - what, no embeddable version?]

Leeds.
Towards the end of March, I'll be attending the ICE 3 conference (Ideas, Cyberspace, Education) at Ross Priory on the shores of Loch Lomond, Scotland (hopefully the conference acronym won't reflect the weather there). My own paper deals with issues around teaching produsage, but in the lead-up to this small but apparently high-powered conference (Gunther Kress is a keynote speaker), one of the presenter teams has set up a blog to discuss the challenges of social software and other online publishing models for the traditional academic publishing environment. Reading one of the position statements, by Bruce Ingraham, led me to post a somewhat un-bloggy, lengthy response, which I'm also reposting here:

Leeds.
After my guest lecture at the University of Lincoln the other day, one of the students, David Lawson, sent me an email with a couple of very thoughtful questions. I thought I might as well answer them publicly - further comments are, as always, invited...

After thinking about your lecture and how it may relate to the work that I'm doing, I saw the connection. The new publishing mode that you propose, 'produsage', throws up the question of Does this model better fit today's society, with relation to people's attraction to media that has no set narrative trajectory? If users are finding, contributing to and distributing the news then where is the narrative structure of this medium?