'Mastering' the Media…

In my previous blogpost, ‘Information visualization, not only an academic practice?,’ I finished with the statement that there are many other authors (besides Manuel Lima) that talk about artistic ways of information visualization and the distinctions these cultural practices have from traditional (conventional academic) information visualization.

For example the Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Robert Kosara, of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, wrote the article ‘Visualization criticism – the missing link between information visualization and art.’ In this he introduces the notions of pragmatic and artistic visualization to delineate between two very different approaches within the general field of visualization (Figure 1). The pragmatic approach is mostly practiced by computer scientists, is a technical, analysis-oriented process which visualizes data to generate new insight and amplify cognition (like scientific or information visualization) – while the artistic approach works with the sublime, an aesthetic criteria that means as much as, that which is “enigmatic and captivating at the same time (2007).” Artistic visualizations are usually used to communicate a concern, to let someone contemplate and reflect on something. But although pragmatic and artistic visualizations are intrinsically different, Kosara proposes the idea of visualization criticism, as a way to create a unifying set of aspects/criteria to discuss and evaluate these diverging types of visualizations. A critique does have its guidelines though and must abide to the following: have a neutral voice, state the facts, not being self-promotional and have the ‘clear goal’ of helping, by pointing out alternative approaches or researches. With this we might come to a deeper understanding of the field of visualization in general and bridge existing gaps between those different cultural practices within it.

Figure 1: Robert Kosara’s schematic representation of the spectrum from pragmatic to artistic visualization, where the first focuses primarily on utilitarian products the second is more focused on sublime artifacts.

Pousman et. al. also talk about artistic visualizations or more specifically about artistic information visualization but places it under the proposed umbrella term casual information visualization together with ambient and social information visualization. They argue that the traditional definition of information visualization (from Card et. al., 1999)  is very broad encompassing projects that are related to, but traditionally not (conventional academic) information visualization systems. And define casual information visualization as “the use of computer mediated tools to depict personally meaningful information in visual ways that support everyday users in both everyday work and non-work situations (2007).”

This definition gives a solid foundation to make a clear distinction between projects to which we generally refer as information visualization, which Pousman et. al. define as “center” or “core” information visualization systems and those that lie at the “margins” or “edges,” (for which they give the examples of ambient, social and artistic information visualization). To exemplify this, Pousman et. al. argue that a lot of (conventional academic) information visualization systems are used as task-specific tools by ‘expert’ user-groups, who have knowledge and experience in analyzing problems in a certain field or domain; these tools enable them to explore and analyze data, generate, refine and test hypotheses which in the end lead to new insights. This is done frequently, with focused phases or episodes of use of an information visualization system; Pousman et. al. therefore “call this usage pattern of [information visualization] ‘episodic’ characterized by its duration, intensity, and goal-orientation (2007).”

Another major difference with casual information visualization systems, is that they support multiple types of insight. Insight can be intentional but it can also be a by product of e.g. going about your daily business, Pousman et. al. therefore argue that “the relationship between information and insight is more complicated than a simple linear relation (2007).” The insights that are gained by interacting for example with an (conventional academic) information visualization system could be large or small, depending on the knowledge a user has of that particular field. Pousman et. al. propose a set of different types of insight to define where casual information visualization systems generally focus on, namely awareness, social and reflective insights. Pousman et. al. do “note that the types of insight are not mutually exclusive, so a particular insight might have components of both analytic insight and social insight (2007).”

Awareness insight comes from maintaining awareness of a data-stream, which gives a sense of the fluctuations or shifting patterns in the data, without the need for some crystalized conclusion (Pousman et. al. 2007). Social insight is about social-networks, situations and life. It “is the sense of understanding of a social group and one’s place in it (Pousman et. al., 2007),” which is mostly contingent and thus subject to constant revision and reinterpretation.

“Reflective insight is insight about oneself, the world, and one’s place in it” – it is usually reached by providing a basis for reflection to contemplate “one’s personal and idiosyncratic thoughts (Pousman et. al., 2007).” Reflection is a common tool in artistic visualizations in general and is usually gained by means of defamiliarization which is a term Pousman et. al. lend from Bell et. al. to describe the way the normal or mundane is made strange, described as if seen through eyes from another planet. Through the mechanism of defamiliarization we might be able to “actively reflect on, rather than passively propagate, the existing politics and culture of home life [1] (Bell et. al., 2005).” Although, creating distance or new perspectives might be confusing, “the system’s confusion might lead to interest, reflection, and conversation amongst (Pousman et. al., 2007)” the observing users. Pouseman et. al. therefore conclude that “defamiliarization [...] makes the visualization stronger, even as it changes the notion of what it means for a system to provide insight (2007).”

Traditional or conventional academic, information visualization systems “maintain a functionalist perspective, in that they are designed to be helpful for a particular set of analytic tasks (Pouseman et. al., 2007).“ In contrast to this, artistic information visualizations or “data-driven artworks,” that work with either defamiliarization or the sublime (or both), differ according to Pouseman et. al. because they “may challenge some of our notions of visualization and computer-mediated understanding, our notions of what constitutes data, and may even question our ideas about the infrastructure of computer systems (2007).” Instead of being ‘helpful’ or useful for analysis, artistic information visualization (like other forms of art) is generally used for reflection on e.g. oneself, society, culture or philosophy but also on other issues, concepts or even objects, such as “computer networks, algorithms, and data itself (Pouseman et. al., 2007).”

Figure 2: A great visualization from Erik Borra, Paulien Dresscher and Minke Kampman, shows an overview of the two articles I have just mentioned and even build on the work of Andrew Vande Moere. It was published here on the MoM before but since it was so relevant to my current blogposting I decided to include it in case any of you missed it.

Source listings
Literature:
Bell, G., M. Blythe, and P. Sengers. Making by making strange: Defamiliarization and the design of domestic technologies. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact., 12(2):149–173, 2005.

Card, S.K., J.D. Mackinlay, and B. Shneiderman (1999). Excerpts from: Readings in information visualization: Using vision to think. San Francisco: Morgan Stanley Kaufmann Publishers. (Chapter 1, “Information Visualization”, pp. 1-34).

Kosara, R. Visualization Criticism – The Missing Link Between Information Visualization and Art, July 2007.

Pousman, Z., Stasko, J., Mateas, M.: Casual information visualization: Depictions of data in everyday life. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 13(6):1145–1152, 2007.

Other:
Kampman, Minke. ‘A New Discourse? – The Position of Data Art within InfoVis,’ February 29th, 2008. Available at: http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2008/02/29/a-new-discourse-the-position-of-data-art-within-infovis/

In the last couple of weeks I got some responses to my post concerning the revisitation of my Wikipedia article about Richard A. Rogers – in which I told that I was stupefied by the speed with which I was blamed for ‘self-promotion’ and ‘bias’ and about the fact that the original article was removed immediately after creation – these developments didn’t do any good to my mood or opinion of Wikipedia. In class there was a lot of discussion about the so-called ‘democracy’ of the encyclopaedia, which in our opinion was near to zero, after experiencing the fate of our well-made articles. Boldly I decided to copy-paste my PDF version of the article in a new article page to be able to show what I did for the assignment that week – fully expecting it to be deleted again within minutes – but strangely this time the article survived, for weeks even, so I was completely baffled. In the comments it was suggested that I had to clean-up the grammatical and formatting errors for the article to survive – but this was already the ‘second’ version in which I didn’t care about the format any more – my Dutch grammar, as my English, might not be perfect but still in my opinion it was ‘okay’. Of course I did use a translator for some specific words, but I would never use an automatic translation software for the entire page and just copy it, as was suggested.

A little later I received an email from Richard Rogers himself, responding to the article made about him, in which he asked what my plans were with the article. I responded that I wanted to keep the article, although I was growing tired of the Wikipedia after seeing my own article – and most of my fellow master classmates – rejected so soon. I really began to feel annoyed after going to all the trouble of creating the article in the first place but still I decided that I would like the article to be kept, since I took the effort creating it and I really felt the article was an addition to the encyclopaedia. My main argument for this was that Rogers is teaching in the Netherlands for quite some time now – he is mentioned frequently in the Wikipedia (on pages such as Media studies and New Media) – but he himself didn’t have a Dutch Wikipedia article. Luckily this made some sense to the Wikipedians who where interested and discussing deletion, so this time the second version of the article was going to stay, at least for a little while.

I registered at Wikipedia (under the name Xan82) and became an Wikipedian, this has the extra advantage of creating a discussion page for topics related to you and very soon I got some messages about the article of Richard Rogers. There were some tips concerning the discussion of deletion for the article – on which I was encouraged to participate and defend my views on why it should be preserved – but mostly there where tips on the protocols of Wikipedia itself which I’m expected to follow if I want to keep participating; you can read through these remarks at my discussion page. It is true that I’m still learning but I prefer to do that as I’m going, since there is no way of getting trough all the rules for content and formatting, remembering them, or let alone know how to use them! Eventually I did do some extra work on the article; I cleaned-up the formatting (again) and made some revisions, especially grammatical, to improve the overall quality of the article. And since I had asked Rogers, in my reply to his email, for comments/additions on the article and a recent picture to add – on which I got a quick response with lots of improvements for the article – I decided to make those additions too.

In retrospective our attempts to make an addition to the well-known online-encyclopaedia maybe started of a little to naive, for the Wikipedia is already nearing its tenth year of existence (the Dutch version was introduced a few months after the English version) and therefore has core-groups at its communities, which decide ‘what goes’ in their environment. These groups are relatively small but hold the daily reign over the encyclopaedia – and so it should be, as Shirky argues in his presentation ‘A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy’ – although it is frowned upon to be a ‘vigilante’ in our society, in a lawless space as Wikipedia it is necessary for participants to take the ‘law’ into their own hands. “.. Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. [..] Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members [1].”

If we would have read Rogers oration ‘The End of the Virtual’ before we started editing – we might have picked-up on the existence of the Wikipedians ‘vigilance’, which means: ‘the action or state of keeping careful watch for possible danger or difficulties’ – as he writes that although “.. the editors are unpaid, [they are] committed and highly vigilant. The vigilance of the crowd, as it is termed, is something of a mythical feature of a quality-producing Web, until one considers how vigilance is performed [2].” A fairly strong point of the encyclopaedia, for without ‘vigilance’ how would for example vandals be kept at bay indeed? It is by the grace of the new technologies that this is even possible, or as Rogers and colleagues have termed, because of “networked content [3]” which “refers to content held together by human authors and nonhuman tenders, including bots and alert software which revert edits or notify Wikipedians of changes made [2].”

This is of course an explanation of the speed with which we attracted reactions from the Wikipedians; “Indeed, when looking at the statistics available on Wikipedia on the number of edits per Wikipedian user, it is remarkable to note that the bots are by far the top editors. The contention, which is being researched in the digital methods program, is that the bots and the alert software are significant agents of vigilance, maintaining the quality of Wikipedia [2].” We will probably get further acquainted with these ‘quality control mechanisms’ and other methods in our course by Rogers after the school-break, but I do feel that the hands-on experience so far has taught us a lot and can give further insights during the classes. Because after the reading of these theoretical backgrounds, I now might have an better understanding of what has been going on – but I still feel the immediate deletion of my article was a bit harsh – I really tried to make an good addition to the encyclopaedia and with some help from other Wikipedians I’m sure the vote for deletion would have been gone within a few weeks. Still it seems that you can’t count on ‘help’; you should try to do a job completely or not at all and if you really need help with something, ask for it! That has seemed to work for me so far..

[1] Shirky, C. ‘A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy’, A speech at ETech, April, 2003. http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

[2] Rogers, R. ‘The End of the Virtual’, Digital Methods. Amsterdam University Press, 2009. http://www.govcom.org/publications/full_list/oratie_Rogers_2009_preprint.pdf

[3] Niederer, 2009. Note #59 taken from ‘The End of the Virtual’.

Last week all of the Master students where assigned to start a ‘new’ Wikipedia article, which we all did but with which most of us had a lot of troubles. Most articles where deleted within minutes after creation, others where submitted to be deleted for various reasons. My own article about ‘Richard A. Rogers’, one of our Professors, was also deleted very fast – reason? – the article was biased and self-promoting according to the ‘WikiAdmin’ who deleted it.. The fact that the same page already existed in the English Wikipedia (@http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Rogers) and has about the same content doesn’t seem to matter!

Of course I was a little pissed at these developments, you try your best to make an honest contribution and get shot down for apparently no good reason. So when I was presenting my work for class that week I thought it would be fun to mess a little with the system, I opened the page again and put the article back, only this time I didn’t care about the mark-up.. and voilà – the contribution was allowed to live on! While I expected it to be deleted again real soon, it is still up there. Go and see for your self @: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_a._rogers. But I still don’t understand it, maybe someone else could explain the logic behind this?

Once again the online-encyclopaedia Wikipedia is in the spotlight of attention; after years of various forms of praise, critique and academic studies – in which several different and overlapping aspects of Wikipedia have been discussed – the encyclopaedia has decided once again it wants to increase its authority on the internet. This should be achieved (somewhere this fall [1]) by enhancing Wikipedia’s reliability through the use of coloured text; this technique, called WikiTrust, is a project of professor Luca de Alfaro [2] from the University of California, Santa Cruz, which “is part of ongoing work [..] on reputation systems, online collaboration, and information trust.” The name ‘WikiTrust‘ can be a little misleading though, since it has no way of telling how trustworthy texts really are. “‘It can only measure user agreement,’ said de Alfaro. ‘That’s what it does [2].’”

Fig. 1: Cross' example of colorized text.

The idea – of using coloured text in Wikipedia’s articles to increase reliability – isn’t exactly ‘new’; Tom Cross “.. a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology”, wrote in 2006 the article ‘Puppy smoothies: Improving the reliability of open, collaborative wikis‘, which was published on the online, open, peer-reviewed journal First Monday. Herein he argues that the text in Wikipedia’s article’s should be coloured on its venerability – or grounded on the time that text has been in an article [Fig. 1] – his “.. proposal relies on the philosophy that bad information is less likely to survive a collaborative editing process over large numbers of edits (Cross, 2006).” This should raise the confidence that users have in Wikipedia, because they are provided with a visual tool which shows how venerable a particular piece of text is and with this users should be able to appraise the worth of an article. Cross’ thoughts had been mentioned again by Virgil Griffith, “a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology“, who programmed the WikiScanner in 2007 to increase the reliability of Wikipedia’s more ‘controversial’ topics. In his original WikiScanner FAQ, Griffith wrote: “Overall–especially for non-controversial topics–Wikipedia seems to work [..] As for other approaches, I think colored text is a promising direction for combating disinformation in wikipedia (2008).”

Now (in 2009) the basis of Cross’ brainchild, will have a test-run in the form of WikiTrust [Fig.2], which is essentially an extension of MediaWiki – the ‘Content Management System’ which is the ‘engine’ of Wikipedia and many others – “that implements an author reputation system, and a text trust system, for wikis. WikiTrust adds to a wiki a check text tab that enables any visitor to check the author, origin, and reliability of wiki text. Thus, visitors can easily spot spam, surreptitious changes, and information tampering [3].” WikiTrust works real-time, meaning that edits are analysed as users are typing (suddenly beginning to feel a little paranoid while writing this…) and by doing so it calculates the reputation of the author, trust of the text and its origin. According to the Wiki it should have the following functionalities:

• 

  Fig. 2: WikiTrust coloured text example.

  Text author: The author of every word in a text will be computed by an algorithm which should be able to resist “cut-and-pase, delete-and-reinsert, and most type of attacks ([WikiTrust developers even] claim, all attacks — try your hand at it and let [them] know!).” By clicking on a “check text tab, when the mouse pointer hovers over a word, [the original] author of the word [3]” should be shown by a small pop-up in the screen.

• Text origin: By keeping track of the authors, WikiTrust is also (supposed to be) able to keep track of the revision of every word – when it was inserted or introduced and more importantly, by whom – this allows for examination of all edits (again, in the check text tab) and gives access to information on the author of the edit.
• Text trust: Trust of parts of text will be calculated through the ‘reputation’ of the original author and all other users who have made revisions to it, the ‘trust outcome’ will then be displayed (again, in the check text tab) “via text background colors [..]: the background is white for high-trust text, and shades of orange that are the stronger, the lower the text trust [3].”
• Author reputation: The reputation of the author will be calculated from the evolution of the content – “authors who provide lasting contributions gain reputation, while authors whose contributions are reverted in short order lose reputation” – in doing so, the hopes are that the system of reputation will provide “an incentive towards constructive behaviour [3].”

“The goal of the WikiTrust project is to facilitate online content creation and sharing. WikiTrust flags recent content changes that need scrutiny, and offers the text-tracking tools to investigate the context in which such changes were made. WikiTrust strives to benefit wiki authors, editors, and visitors [3].” The question of course remains… will these developments enhance Wikipedia’s reliability? In my opinion they will, for the reliability and credibility has already been proven to be moderate to high (Chesney, 2006). And in “.. an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and [the famous English encyclopaedia Britannica] coverage of science (Giles, 2005) –” the experts ruled that Wikipedia’s articles came close to Britannica’s in terms of accuracy. Of course, technical extensions like WikiTrust, will not automatically solve every issue within Wikpedia but every improvement will get us one step closer towards a better version. It seems to me that the academic community is still very ‘charmed’ by the Wikipedia – in several researches its been mentioned that is a great background reading to several topics – but it still remains questionable to use it as an authoritative source.

Sources & further reading:

[1] Leggett, H., 2009. ‘Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text’, Wired, August 30. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/wikitrust/.

[2] Claburn, T., 2009. ‘Wikipedia Considers Coloring Untested Text’, InformationWeek, augustus 31. http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/security/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219500669.

[3] WikiTrust, Wiki:Main_Page, http://wikitrust.soe.ucsc.edu/index.php/Main_Page.

Ik ben nog niet zolang geleden afgestudeerd in de richting ‘Interactieve Media’ van de Hogeschool van Amsterdam, ik heb ervoor gekozen om dit doel te bereiken d.m.v. een scriptie. Hierin heb ik mij hoofdzakelijk gericht op de Online-Encyclopedie Wikipedia en de ‘controversialiteit’ omtrent deze open applicatie; hierbij was mijn hoofdvraag: Vanuit welke zienswijzen is Wikipedia een controversiële applicatie? Ik heb hieronder mijn abstract, inleiding en hoofdstuk indeling gepost, zodat je een generale indicatie kan krijgen van de onderwerpen en schrijfwijze, maar uiteraard heb ik ook een versie online staan om te downloaden!

Abstract
Wikipedia is vaak in het nieuws wegens het controversiële karakter van de informatie die het bevat – toch blijkt dit volgens onderzoek eerder uitzondering dan regel te zijn – en de democratisering van kennis lijkt zich met behulp van ‘collectieve intelligentie’ (CI) gestaag voor te zetten. Lévy beweerd dat deze ontwikkelingen slechts het begin zijn en is bezig met het ontwikkelen van IEML voor de volgende stap richting ‘totale CI’. Maar verschillende auteurs vallen de initiatieven van de online open-encyclopedie aan – het zou door tekort aan expertise ‘onzin’ bevatten, helemaal niet neutraal geschreven artikelen hebben – en (vooral ‘CI’ zou) ons leiden naar een nieuw soort communisme. Toch zijn er ook veel voorstanders van Wikipedia die beargumenteren dat de betrouwbaarheid al vrij hoog ligt en groeiende is – er wordt meer gebruik gemaakt van wetenschappelijke bronnen – maar het is momenteel nog ‘dubieus’ om het als autoritaire bron te gebruiken. Mogelijkerwijs zou Wikipedia in de toekomst – eventueel met de implementatie van een aantal suggesties om de betrouwbaarheid nog hoger te maken – een beduidende rol kunnen gaan spelen in de disseminatie van wetenschappelijke kennis.

Inleiding
De online-encyclopedie Wikipedia heeft de afgelopen jaren in het middelpunt van de aandacht gestaan van verschillende artikelen en onderzoeken. De openheid, waardoor iedereen ten alle tijden aanpassingen aan een artikel kan maken, zorgt overduidelijk voor de nodige controversies tijdens het creatie-proces van de encyclopedie. Zo wilde VVD-Kamerlid Patricia Remak bijvoorbeeld, dat Wikipedia een stuk over haar veroordeling door het Gerechtshof, wegens het onterecht vangen van wachtgeld, uit haar artikel zou verwijderen. Een groep psychologen is ‘woedend’ omdat de antwoorden voor de ‘Rorschachtest’ in de artikelen is opgenomen – ze vinden het te vergelijken met examenvragen die zijn vrijgegeven voordat de ‘toets’ plaatsneemt. En de BBC News rapporteerde dat o.a. de CIA en het Vaticaan met behulp van de WikiScanner zijn ‘betrapt’ op ongewenste aanpassingen in de Wikipedia. “However, an expert-led investigation carried out by Nature — the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica’s coverage of science — suggests that such high-profile examples are the exception rather than the rule (Giles, 2005).”

Daarnaast is de openheid juist één van de bewezen theoretische hoofdregel van het hedendaagse Web 2.0; zoals Flew omschrijft: “Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them … [or] harnessing ‘collective intelligence’ (2008: p.17)”. Dit laatste begrip staat bijvoorbeeld voor Jenkins centraal in de verklaring van Wikipedia’s succes (Flew, 2008: p.64). Door zich op Web 2.0 principes te baseren heeft Wikipedia het voor elkaar gekregen om één “of the fastest growing websites of the 2000s (Flew, 2008: p.17)” te worden. Het wordt dan ook meer en meer gebruikt en zelfs door third-party’s ingebed, zoals Google Maps waar het als extra informatie voor een object op de kaart zorgt en Google News dat experimenteert met Wikipedia op zijn homepagina. Maar Lévy beargumenteerd dat dit slechts het begin van CI is en dat we nog een lange weg hebben te gaan voordat we een volwaardige ‘kennisruimte’ hebben – waarmee we een ‘Cosmopedia’ kunnen creëren – een op-/naslagwerk met alle informatie en kennis ooit gecreëerd.

Maar niet iedereen bejubeld deze ontwikkelingen, Lanier waarschuwt dat o.a. Wikipedia ons (met de hype-term ‘Collectieve Intelligentie’) naar een nieuw soort ‘digitaal communisme’ aan het leiden is en wijst op de consequenties hiervan. Oud-eindredacteur van de encyclopedie Britannica, Robert McHenry schrijft: ” ’Wikipedia’s goal is to create a free encyclopedia — indeed, the largest encyclopedia in history, both in terms of breadth and depth and also to become a reliable resource.’ Note the adjectives, and the order in which they appear: free, largest (breadth), largest (depth) ‘and also’ reliable (2004).” Maar naar zijn idee kan de betrouwbaarheid van de open-encyclopedie helemaal niet worden gegarandeerd, vooral omdat er géén experts tijdens het creatie-proces aan te pas komen. McHenry beargumenteerd hierdoor dat: “the process allows Wikipedia to approach the truth asymptotically. The basis for the assertion that this is advantageous vis-à-vis the traditional method of editing an encyclopedia remains, however, unclear (2004).” In zijn opinie zou het onderzoek van Nature een bron van schaamte moeten zijn voor degene die het verzonnen en gepubliceerd hebben (McHenry, 2006). Karen Schneider kan Wikipedia ook niet vertrouwen door het tekort aan experts, daarnaast betwijfeld ze het democratische proces en de gewenste neutraliteit, ze schrijft: “.. the only truly neutral point of view is the point of view that is not clobbered into place by the loudest, most persistent voices, the hegemonic, patriarchal model of days of yore (2005).”

Er is dus vanuit verschillende hoeken hevige kritiek op Wikipedia geuit – Griffith beargumenteerd dat een groot gedeelte van Wikipedia’s controversialiteit te danken is aan de inherente technische tekortkomingen van het internet – we zouden de betrouwbaarheid op andere manieren moeten proberen te waarborgen. Toch is het géén ‘bevuild badwater’ zoals Vantyghem formuleert – het is nuttig voor zeer veel verschillende doeleinden – maar voor zekerheid moet er terug gegrepen worden naar ‘originele bronnen’. Nielsen verteld dat het gestructureerd gebruik van citaten stijgt in Wikipedia – en Chesney publiceerde in First Monday zijn empirische onderzoek naar de geloofwaardigheid van Wikipedia – de experts bevonden de onderzochte artikelen geloofwaardiger dan de te cynisch ingestelde non-experts (2006). Toch beargumenteerd Shirky dat de discussies omtrent Wikipedia voorlopig nog niet gesloten zullen worden (2008) – mijn interesse was hiermee gewekt waardoor ik besloot  om verder op onderzoek te gaan – ik zal proberen aan de hand van verschillende auteurs een antwoord te formuleren op de onderzoeksvraag:

Vanuit welke zienswijzen is Wikipedia een controversiële applicatie?

Inhoudsopgave
Inleiding                                                                                             pagina 3
Kennis en informatie                                                                       pagina 5
Collective & Connected Intelligence                                             pagina 8
Lévy’s Information Economy Meta-Language (IEML)             pagina 10
Kritieken op Wikipedia                                                                    pagina 12
Digitaal communisme                                                                      pagina 12
De expert discussie                                                                           pagina 16
Problemen met het neutrale perspectief                                      pagina 18
Technische tekortkomingen                                                           pagina 20
Het huidige niveau van Wikipedia                                                pagina 23
Conclusie                                                                                            pagina 26
Bronvermelding                                                                                pagina 28