oggy1116

Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia’s 26 million articles in 286 languages, over 4.2 million in the English Wikipedia alone, are written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.[4] It has become the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet,[5][6][7][8][9] ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide.[5][10]¹

Pros and Cons of Wikipedia

Pros

1. Interactions: Wikipedia is a community Wikipedians and British Museum curators collaborate on the article Hoxne Hoard in June 2010. Members of the community interact with each other predominantly via ‘talk’ pages, which are wiki-edited pages that are associated with articles, as well as via talk pages that are specific to particular contributors, and talk pages that help run the site. These pages help the contributors reach consensus about what the contents of the articles should be, how the site’s rules may change, and to take actions with respect to any problems within the community.[95]²

2. Motivations of Wikipedia contributor  Oded Nov, in his 2007 paper “What Motivates Wikipedians”, related the motivations of volunteers in general to the motivations of people who contribute to Wikipedia.[6] Nov carried out a survey using the six motivations of  volunteers, identified in an earlier paper.[7] The six motivations he used were:³

• Values – expressing values to do with altruism and helping others
• Social – engaging with friends, taking part in activities viewed favourably by others
• Understanding – expanding knowledge through activities
• Career – gaining work experience and skills
• Protective – e.g. reducing guilt over personal privilege
• Enhancement – demonstrating knowledge to others
• Ideology – expressing support for what is perceived to be the underlying ideology of the activity (e.g. the belief that knowledge should be free)
• Fun – enjoying the activity

Cons

1. Wikipedia: Vandalism. On Wikipedia, vandalism is the act of editing the project in a malicious manner that is intentionally disruptive. Vandalism includes the addition, removal, or other modification of the text or other material that is either humorous, nonsensical, a hoax, or that is of an offensive, humiliating, or otherwise degrading nature. Throughout Wikipedia’s history, Wikipedia has struggled to maintain a balance between allowing the freedom of open editing and protecting the truth and accuracy of its information when false information can be potentially damaging to its subjects. [1] Vandalism is easy to commit on Wikipedia because anyone can edit the site. [2] Founder Jimmy Wales is very much aware of the fact that the open editing policy allows the addition of false information. [3] Most vandalism is committed on impulse, often by those who are bored and/or malicious. Such vandalism can be committed by either guest editors or those with registered accounts; however, a protected or semi-protected page can only be edited by auto confirmed or registered Wikipedia editors, or administrators. [3] Frequent targets of vandalism include articles on hot and controversial topics and current events. [4][5] In some cases, people have been falsely reported as having died. This has notably occurred to United States Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd (both of whom are now deceased), and American rapper Kanye West (who is not deceased.)⁴

 

2. One privacy concern in the case of Wikipedia is the right of a private citizen to remain private: to remain a “private citizen” rather than a “public figure” in the eyes of the law. [70] It is a battle between the right to be anonymous in cyberspace and the right to be anonymous in real life (“meatspace“). A particular problem occurs in the case of an individual who is relatively unimportant and for whom there exists a Wikipedia page against her or his wishes. In January 2006, a German court ordered the German Wikipedia shut down within Germany because it stated the full name of Boris Floricic, aka “Tron”, a deceased hacker who was formerly with the Chaos Computer Club. More specifically, the court ordered that the URL within the German .de domain (http://www.wikipedia.de/) may no longer redirect to the encyclopedia’s servers in Florida at http://de.wikipedia.org although German readers were still able to use the US-based URL directly, and there was virtually no loss of access on their part. The court order arose out of a lawsuit filed by Floricic’s parents, demanding that their son’s surname be removed from Wikipedia. [71] On February 9, 2006, the injunction against Wikimedia Deutschland was overturned, with the court rejecting the notion that Tron’s right to privacy or that of his parents were being violated. [72] The plaintiffs appealed to the Berlin state court, but were refused in May 2006.⁵

 3. Diversity and Capacity – Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference websites, attracting 470 million unique visitors monthly as of February 2012.[1] There are more than 77,000 active contributors working on over 22,000,000 articles in 285 languages. As of today, there are 4,226,469 articles in English. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles to augment the knowledge held by the Wikipedia encyclopedia.

The Wikipedia community is the community of contributors to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. These contributors are also known as “Wikipedians”. The overwhelming majority of them are volunteers. Oxford Dictionary added word “Wikipedian” in August 2012.⁶

 Of all the social media, I find WIKIPEDIA the online Encyclopedia, one of the most widely used and readily available anywhere in the world..  Since this is a collaboration of writers any topics are mostly covered and dealt with but vandalism is very rampant because this uses a freedom of open editing.  Privacy too is often invaded by guest contributors but Wikipedia’s auto confirmed editors or Wikipedia editors or administrators are the only ones who can edit a protected or semi  protected sites.

 Interactions between contributors  was made into a community known as Wipedians.  Wikipedians have offline activities organised by Wikimedia Foundation or the community of Wikipedians.  They have a face to face meetings either small and informal or large and formal they all call a Wikimeet. This lead to an annual international conference called Wikimania for users of wiki projects such as social and technical aspects operated by Wikimedia Foundation.

References:

1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia

3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

4http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandalism_on_Wikipedia#cite_note-ABC_AU_275942-6

5http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_community