You Can Look It Up: The Wikipedia Story Questions

1.       What did wiki software allow Web users to do that the Mosaic browser did not?

2.       What do blogs and wikis have in common?

3.       What problem did a young Jimmy Wales find with the World Book Encyclopedia?

4.       How was Jimmy Wales inspired by the World Book Encyclopedia to create Wikipedia?

5.       How have encyclopedias inspired you in your own life?

6.       Why did Nupedia fail?

7.       How did wiki software change the ideas behind Nupedia?

8.       What is “crowdsourcing?”

9.       What do you think about the concept of “any fool in the world” being able to write articles for Wikipedia?

10.    Do agree with the idea that “total idiots” could edit Wikipedia and of that being a good thing? Explain.

11.    Why do you think Wikipedia grew so fast and became so popular in such a short amount of time?

12.    Do you believe Sanger’s elitist attitude was a good thing or a bad thing for Wikipedia?

13.    What did you learn from the anecdote about the Wikipedia article on Einstein going to Albania for a passport in 1935?

14.    Explain this quote from the article: “I can’t imagine who could have written such detailed guidelines other than a bunch of people working together...It’s common in Wikipedia that we’ll come to a solution that’s really well thought out because so many minds have had a crack at improving it.”

15.    The author of the article states that Wikipedia “grew organically.” What does he mean by that?

16.    How has Wikipedia “been the greatest collaborative knowledge project in history?” 

17.    Based on your own opinion and experience with Wikipedia, do you agree with the above statement or disagree with it? Explain.

18.    What does the author mean by “wiki-crack?”

19.    Based on the article, do you believe Wikipedia is a reliable source of information?

20.    Do you believe its possible for a 16-year-old from New Jersey to write “insightful” Wikipedia articles?

21.    How do you feel about basing your own research on something a 16-year-old wrote on Wikipedia?

22.    What does Jimmy Wales mean by this mission statement: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge?”

23.    Do you agree or disagree with this mission statement?

24.    Do you think Wikipedia has succeeded in its mission?

25.    Do you agree or disagree that ordinary people, people without degrees, can “be part of the process of creating and distributing knowledge?” 

26.    Based on your reading of the article, would you yourself use Wikipedia for your academic research?

27.    Would you yourself like to write and/or edit Wikipedia articles in order to be “a part of the process of creating and distributing knowledge?” Why or why not?

 

1.  Wikis were used as a collaboration tool, where Mosaic browser did not give users the ability to edit the Web pages they were viewing. It turned Web surfers into passive consumers of published content.

2. Both blogs and wikis encouraged user-generated content.  Wikis allowed users to modify Web pages—not by having an editing tool in their browser but by clicking and typing directly onto Web pages that ran wiki software.

3. The problem was that Wales discovered that the World Book had shortcom­ings: no matter how much was in it, there were many more things that weren’t. And this became more so with time. After a few years, there were all sorts of topics—moon landings and rock festivals and protest marches, Kennedys and kings—that were not included. World Book sent out stickers for owners to paste on the pages in order to update the encyclopedia, and Wales was fastidious about doing so.

4. Wales reflected his childhood love of the World Book: an online encyclopedia. He dubbed it Nupedia, and it had two attributes: it would be written by volunteers, and it would be free. Since the book sent out stickers for owners to paste on the pages in order to update the encyclopedia, it inspired the idea of a user-generated encyclopedia.

5. Encyclopedias have inspired my own life by that they offered me a comprehensive summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge. They got me interested more in researching and wanting me to expand my knowledge.

6. Nupedia failed because it was a painfully slow process and, worse yet, not a lot of fun. The whole point of writing for free online, as Justin Hall had shown, was that it produced a jolt of joy. After a year, Nupedia had only about a dozen articles published, making it useless as an encyclopedia, and 150 that were still in draft stage, which indicated how unpleasant the process had become. It had been rigorously engineered not to scale.

7. When Wales decided that he would personally write an article on Robert Merton, an economist who had won the Nobel Prize for creating a mathematical model for markets contain­ing derivatives, it made Wales and Sanger discover Ward Cunningham’s wiki software. Like many digital-age innovations, the application of wiki software to Nupedia in order to create Wikipedia—combining two ideas to create an innovation—was a collaborative process in­volving thoughts that were already in the air. But in this case a very non-wiki-like dispute erupted over who deserved the most credit. The dispute presented a classic case of a historian’s challenge when writing about collaborative creativity: each player has a different rec­ollection of who made which contribution, with a natural tendency to inflate his own.

8. Crowdsourcing is obtaining information or input into a particular task or project by enlisting the services of a number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the Internet.

 

9. I think that concept is a generalization because Wikipedia is community-based. Anyone I agree can write an article on Wikipedia, but then it’s fact-checked and checked by punctuation and accuracy by many other users who participate in the community.

 

10. I would agree that anyone can edit Wikipedia in good and bad intentions, but it’s not a good thing because a lot of effort could have been made by the community while someone gets rid of that hard-work for nothing. Wikipedia is made to allow everyone to cooperate and create articles as accurate as a real encyclopedia, but those doing it for bad intentions is not good and should keep out.

 

11. Wikipedia grew and became popular fast because it became to Web content what GNU/Linux was to software: a peer-to-peer commons collabora­tively created and maintained by volunteers who worked for the civic satisfactions they found. It was a delightful, counterintuitive concept, perfectly suited to the philosophy, attitude, and technology of the Internet. Anyone could edit a page, and the results would show up instantly. You didn’t have to be an expert. You didn’t have to fax in a copy of your diploma. You didn’t have to be authorized by the Powers That Be. You didn’t even have to be registered or use your real name. Sure, that meant vandals could mess up pages. So could idiots or ideologues. But the software kept track of every version. If a bad edit appeared, the community could simply get rid of it by clicking on a “revert” link.

 

12. I believe Sanger’s elitist attitude was a good thing for Wikipedia because he had the wrong idea on its credibility. They had increasingly clashed on fundamental issues, such as Sanger’s desire to give more deference to experts and scholars. In Wales’s view, “people who expect deference because they have a Ph.D. and don’t want to deal with ordinary people tend to be annoying.” Sanger felt, to the contrary, that it was the nonacademic masses who tended to be annoying. “As a community, Wikipedia lacks the habit or tra­dition of respect for expertise,” he wrote in a New Year’s Eve 2004 manifesto that was one of many attacks he leveled after he left. “Sanger turned out to be wrong. The uncredential crowd did not run off the experts. Instead the crowd itself became the expert, and the experts became part of the crowd. The development wouldn’t be interfered anyone with Sanger’s departure.

 

13. What I learned from it was that a key principle of Wikipedia was that articles should have a neutral point of view. This succeeded in producing articles that were generally straightforward, even on controversial topics such as global warming and abortion. It also made it easier for people of different viewpoints to collaborate.

 

14. The quote means that Wales really praises the cooperation and effort between a community to help formulate and create information for everyone to learn and gather easier. It means that Wales  fostered a loose system of collective management, in which he played guide and gentle prodder but not boss. There were wiki pages where users could jointly formulate and debate the rules. Through this mechanism, guidelines were evolved to deal with such matters as reversion practices, media­tion of disputes, the blocking of individual users, and the elevation of a select few to administrator status. All of these rules grew organically from the community rather than being dictated downward by a cen­tral authority. Like the Internet itself, power was distributed.

 

15. Grew organically meant that Wikipedia, like food,  had grown and processed using no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, where these represent a central authority like Sanger was. In terms of business, organic growth is the process of business expansion due to increasing overall customer base, increased output per customer or representative, new sales, or any combination of the above, as opposed to mergers and acquisitions, which are examples of inorganic growth.

 

16. Wikipedia has been the greatest collaborative knowledge project in history by that it was a delightful, counterintuitive concept, perfectly suited to the philosophy, attitude, and technology of the Internet. Anyone could edit a page, and the results would show up instantly. You didn’t have to be an expert. Its central characteristic is that groups of in­dividuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands. These motivations include the psychological reward of interacting with others and the personal gratification of doing a useful task.

 

17. I agree with the above statement because although I never created and participated in making wiki articles, I can already tell that is an effective information site. In fact, there are many types of wikis that are genre-specific whether video games, artist specific, etc. I use it every day to read or reread articles becomes it captivates me and builds my interest because of the information presented. Every time I read, I can see it is always recently edited to make sure there are no major errors with the content. Overall, I agree with the quote as it is a good concept suited for obtaining information on the internet.

 

18. What the author means by wiki-crack is that it’s the rush of dopamine that seems to hit the brain’s pleasure center when you make a smart edit and it appears instantly in a Wikipedia article. Meaning that like the illegal drug crack cocaine, Wikipedia is very addicting.

 

19. I think Wikipedia is a semi-reliable source of information because since it revolves around peer production, the information can be biased or not proved enough information or evidence. The articles in Wikipedia are created by non-credential users where, like blogs, made this a treat available to anyone to express their beliefs. It’s most possible the information is more subjective than objective which is why it’s semi-reliable.

 

20. I believe it is possible for the 16 year old to write an insightful article. Lord Emsworth presented insightful articles about the intricacies of the peerage system that some were featured as the “Article of the Day,” and Lord Emsworth rose to become a Wikipedia administrator, which he was a 16-year-old schoolboy in South Brunswick, New Jersey. On Wikipedia, nobody knows you’re a commoner.

 

21. What I feel about basing my own research on something a 16 year old wrote on Wikipedia is that I can connect to that with deep satisfaction coming from helping to create the information that I use rather than just pas­sively receiving it. I think involvement of people in the information they read can be an important end itself.  A Wikipedia that we create in common is more mean­ingful than would be the same Wikipedia handed to us on a platter. Peer production allows people to be engaged. However, I would try to be more objective in my research, and do lots of fact-checking.

 

22. Jimmy Wales’s mission statement means that Wikipedia has created an opportunity for anyone in the world to present information about everything in the world, and for users to interact with each other to compose the information, and edit it throughout the interface process to present it more accurately. It was a huge, audacious, and worthy goal. It allowed the sharing of information rather than accessing other people’s knowledge. It created an embodiment between users to present a comprehensive summary and analysis of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge.

 

23. I agree with the statement because the site gave more than free access to knowledge; it was also about empowering them, in a way not seen before in history, to be part of the process of creating and distributing knowledge. Wikipedia allowed to help build some­thing that’s far more rewarding than having it handed down to someone alone.

 

24. Based on the article, and my interpretations and responses above, I agree that Wikipedia has, although not fully, successfully achieved and is approaching its mission.

 

25. As long as there is a community to guide you in the process of creating and distributing knowledge as well as prior skill in research and objectivity, then anyone can be a part of the process.

 

26. In terms of primary academic research, I would not use Wikipedia as part of my research, where as I said before, it is semi-reliable where I need professional resources that contain objective and accurate information.

 

27. I would see myself writing and/or editing Wikipedia articles in order to be a part of the process of creating and distributing knowledge. I would do so because it will allow me to be more engaging with others’’ knowledge, and edit them like it was giving them warm and cool feedback. It would allow me to cooperate and put effort between a community to help formulate and create information for everyone to learn and gather easier.