Week 12 Wikipedia-centric presentation on:
-Clay Shirky's Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production
-Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur
This presentation walks through Shirky's points, explaining how Wikipedia is held as the ideal model of collaborative production in today's Web 2.0 world. However, it also goes beyond the readings in introducing the WikiScanner and all it has uncovered. This implies that the real issue may not be what Keen calls the "endless digital forest of mediocrity", but the fact that "Wikipedia entries are being used as a medium for corporate propaganda".
2. We can’t rely on just one source of information . We don’t know who wrote it. Contributors may have agendas, and significant editing authority. Errors can go uncorrected for months.
3. Robbie Williams eats domestic pets in pubs for money. David Beckham was a Chinese goalkeeper in the 18th century. Sergey Brin (of Google fame) is sexy, dating Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder), and dead. Tony Blair worships Hitler. The Duchess of Cornwall's Christian name is Cow-miller. The University of Cincinnati's former president is a whore. A yacht killed British TV presenter Vernon Kay. Conan O'Brien assaults sea turtles while canoeing. British TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh published a new version of the Kama Sutra. Sienna Miller has modelled nude.
4.
5. Wikipedia’s self-correction process (Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales calls it “self-healing”) is very robust. There is considerable value created by the public review process that is continually going on in Wikipedia – value that is easy to underestimate, for those who have not experienced it adequately.