Wikipedia is considered to be the largest online database of information. Launched in 2001, Wikipedia has had exponential growth and have celebrated it’s 3 millionth article in August 2009. However, in the past month, both Times Magazine and Fast Company have written about the decline in user participation in Wikipedia in the last two years. In 2006 declines in the number of article posts surface and in 2007 users began participating less frequently in editing articles.
Times pointed out one reason behind this decline.
The site has simply hit the natural limit of knowledge expansion. In its early days, it was easy to add stuff. But once others had entered historical sketches of every American city, taxonomies of all the world’s species, bios of every character on The Sopranos and essentially everything else — well, what more could they expect you to add? [1]
This is certainly the case with Wikipedia. In my own attempt to write a new article on the site, I had to research for possible topics for several hours before finally finding that an article on “Krause Springs” had not been published yet. Creating new articles in English are especially difficult now that millions of articles have already been published.
A more significant argument on the decline of Wikipedia correlates to the rise of editorial management on the site. One of the major criticisms of Wikipedia is the power the site community gives to certain users to edit and delete articles over others. Fast Company writes,
Those passive editors who make just a single change per month see around a quarter of their changes erased or modified by other, more active editors (the rate was just 10% in 2003). [2]
Number of users are declining
System Operators on Wikipedia are given more access to the site and therefore have more power than other users. [3] In the past few years, Wikipedia has become more aggressive in editing and deleting content which is a positive move to become a more “reliable” source of information, but also extremely negative in terms of attracting new users to participate and give their own opinion. If potential new users attempt to publish articles only to have them heavily edited or deleted, these participants become discouraged and revert back to just being passive observers, thus perpetuating the already slanted demographic in the Wikipedia community. In order for a more diverse population to participate and for future growth to develop, Wikipedia will have to create a more user friendly system where new users are not constantly battling with Wikipedia authorities to participate in the community.
Hi friends. I recently started a new blog called Muntthee about life in Amsterdam. I will be posting pictures, videos, events, anything relating to Amsterdam on this blog. Let me what you think!
Lisa Nakamura’s book Digitizing Race and Culture: Visual Cultures of the Internet covers a range of issues involving race and gender on the internet. Nakamura is an associate professor in the Institute of Communication Research with a joint appointment in Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
She begins by giving a historical background of race in American politics in the nineties. During the Clinton-Gore administration, a new movement of neo-liberalism brought about racial “colorblindness”. The idea being that it would be more progressive to avoid the subject of race and not address racial differences in politics. By omitting racial discussion during the emergence of the internet, relevant research of race on the internet was never produced.
Instead of covering blatant racism by hate sites and focusing on the more radical case studies, Nakamura covered five very different areas involving race and gender on the web. In the first chapter she discusses the visual culture of AIM buddies. AOL Instant Messenger graphic icons are hugely popular on the internet. Many websites are just for the creation of these icons. Users especially like to take part in creating these icons and many have racial identities attached to the icon such as an animated GIF of a cartoon girl wearing an all American flag outfit with the words “Never 4get 9-11.” These user generated icons visualize the need internet users have of identifying themselves based on race and culture to their peers on the web.
Nakamura then introduces the website www.alllooksame.com where users take a quiz by guessing if the person on the screen is Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. Many Asians think they are able to distinguish between different Asian nationalities but the average person who takes the quiz gets 7 out of 18 images right. This average low score proves that one cannot make judgment based on visual representation of a person (I am of Japanese descent and got a 6/18). I find this website extremely interesting because advertisers or companies are not profiling people, rather the user initially profiles the person and surprisingly discovers that race is more complicated than previously thought.
“Users of alllooksame.com bulletin boards commiserate with each other about their low scores; and importantly, the low scores that most users get confirm that seeing is not believing- the “truth” about race is not a visual truth, yet it is one that is persistently envisioned that way. Alllooksame.com is an apparatus that deconstructs the visual culture of race.”
Within this chapter she also discusses the problem with language and how racism occurs with language due to web biases towards English as the main language for the web. As a case study, she discusses the language divide in a country like India. It is very costly to type in a language like Hindi, therefore many who do not speak another language other than Hindi are left out of cyberspace and even those that speak English has to give up “ typographical purity of Hindi to enter the digital commons. Thus the internet will produce impure or inauthentic expressive forms.”
Nakamura also covers how race in cyberspace is portrayed in film and advertisements. She illustrates the problems with the “whiteness” of the users engaged in high technology in The Matrix Trilogy and The Minority Report. She also discusses Apples famous ad campaign where alpha channeled images in black of people are dancing with their sleek white ipod. Although all the images of the people are completely silhouetted in black, Nakamura argues that race is still represented by stereotypical signifiers based on their clothes, type of music, and attire.
In the fourth chapter, the focus shifts towards feminism when Nakamura introduces www.babydream.com. Just in the past few years, pregnancy websites, forums, and discussion boards have gained popularity for women who are trying to conceive, pregnant, or just given birth. These are websites where women can discuss hopes, fears, problems, and progress of being pregnant and giving birth. This is a very interesting way of studying femininity and race because all of these women have graphic images or real pictures portraying the pregnant status in a visual way. Similarly to the AOL Instant Messanger icons, pregnant women can create their identity by creating an image or choosing from images that most favorably represents them visually. These pregnancy websites can be studied to understand activity of a sub-genre of women on the web.
Finally, Nakamura studies the measurement of race on the web. She discusses the many problems and stereotypes that are involved with web activity among minorities. For example, Asians are considered one of the “model minority” groups and considered to be among the more fluent in technology and more involved in the web. However many studies that prove these results are based on phone interviews in English, thus only taking in to account a small English speaking Asian population and leaving out the rest. This chapter clearly brings about the errors in the ways that research on demographics is performed on the web.
“Many of these surveys design questions that hew to this paradigm by querying respondents on what types of services and activities they engage in, rather than asking them about their cultural production, such as postings to bulletin boards or creation of Web sites or other forms of Internet textuality or graphical expression. Thus Internet use by racial minorities may be misunderstood as being on a par with usage by the white Internet majority in the United States if “access” is the only criterion considered.”
Without asking the right questions when doing web research and going about the research in a multilingual and broader medium, it is difficult to really know which demographics participate in the web and in what way they engage with the internet.
Lisa Nakamura’s research on race and the web is thorough, diverse, and thought provoking. I was glad to discover the different variety of web based race research through film, advertisements, pregnancy bulletin boards, instant messenger, and race based websites. I was fascinated by the way language contributes so largely to race and racial representation on the web and would like to have read more developed research on language and demographics. I found the last chapter to be the most intriguing since it deals with current problems of web demographic research and ways to improve our current study on the web in order to collect a more accurate portrayal of race on the internet.
I actually knew nothing about Google Wave until today. If you want to learn about this new web communication tool, check out the two videos below.
This first video is a three minute condensed review from Cnet. Check out this video if you don’t have time or don’t care about Google’s in depth overview.
This is Google’s official video on Google Wave. If you want to learn everything about Google Wave and have over an hour to spare, then check this one out.
I read about Ikea changing fonts from Futura to Verdana on the headlines of New York Times the other day! Who knew that a company changing fonts could cause such an uproar. Another example of how the web is changing the look of company in the physical world.
Took a road trip with my dad to Marfa, Terlingua, and Big Bend National Park. It was really nice to see some beautiful parts of Texas before I left America.
