FourNames
Final Report link:
Progress Report 2 link:
Wikipedia vs. KNOL
Project description:
Our project is to examine specific meta-design products. These products are Wikipedia and KNOL. Each of these is an online encyclopedia that is modified and extended by many users throughout the world. They are not made solely by one person or one group of people, but are created through the collaboration of the worldly online community at-large. We are going to attempt to determine strengths and weaknesses of each of these encyclopedias, specifically focusing on areas such as coverage of material, relevance of material, credibility, and how up to date the material is. Then, our group will compare these findings between each of these encyclopedias and possibly other non-meta-design encyclopedias like Britannica. Our goal is to see how a meta-design product such as Wikipedia and KNOL can affect the society's knowledge base and what possible implications this can have.
Also, our group is going to look into how these meta-design products really work. In order to accomplish this we will be creating, extending, or modifying some Wikipedia article and then track what exactly happens to it over time. We also plan to attempt some article sabotage in which we modify existing articles or varying popularity with modifications of varying "obviousness." The reason behind this is that we wish to find out how effective Wikipedia is at controlling its articles. This will also give us some insight into how much people can truly rely on information from a meta-design product such as Wikipedia. As a group we have already realized that encyclopedias like these two can be great sources of information. However, we have been told for much of our school career that we are not to trust an informational site that can easily be modified by anyone with a computer and a network connection. This is why we wish to expand our knowledge in this realm and explore the depths of the meta-design products Wikipedia and KNOL.
Roles
-Trevor Aparicio- Throughout these past couple of weeks I have begun to look into Wikipedia as a platform for putting information out into the wide world. I have set up an account so that, later, I will be able to do what I plan to for our project. After setting up this account I looked into exactly how hard it will be to create/modify/extend an article on Wikipedia. It does not seem very difficult at all and should be accomplished with not too much effort.
In the next couple of weeks I will be putting my effort on the project into creating a Wikipedia article as well as thinking of some good ways to achieve some planned out article sabotage. I will be working fairly closely with Nick on this portion and we will be brainstorming modifications that will show us what we feel we want to know.
-Nick Aberle- So far, I have been exploring Wikipedia in more depth than my usual reading of interesting articles. This includes things like reading talk pages and making minor edits to existing articles. I have also been brainstorming potential topics to write an article of our own, but nothing has been decided thus far. In the next few weeks, I will be working with Trevor in creating this article. The first big step is to choose the topic and plan out what we will cover. We hope to get the article done by the next progress report so that we can track any changes to the article up until the final due date. We will also be experimenting with other aspects of the site, changing articles, and analyzing how our changes are handled by the users (or moderators) of the site.
- Bethany Henrikson - I've looked, so far, into one specific topic and followed its changes on both Wikipedia and KNOL. I chose Human-Centered Computing, because it is a wide topic. The first thing I noticed, was what happened when I searched for them. Wikipedia took me straight to the HCC page. KNOL gave me a list of articles to go through. Some were not helpful for this topic (for example: THE CURRENT CRISIS OF MEDICINE AND SCIENCE AND THE PLACE OF MUSIC). One was not helpful to me (I don't know Russian). The other couple of articles were helpful. The Wikipedia article was created February 10, 2005. The last time it was updated was October 19, 2010. Although there are a couple people's names who repeat quite a few times in the list, this article has been edited by lots of different people. On KNOL, the one article I actually found helpful was about Usability in general. It was created July 28, 2005 and was last updated on December 3, 2008. All of the edits for this were done by the same person, even though others have the chance to modify it.
In the following weeks, I plan to find a topic that has more KNOL articles that are relevant to a topic that I'm looking for and then compare them to a Wikipedia article of that topic. This will be much easier than doing it the other way around. I will also go into a more in-depth view of how articles have changed, not just a start and an end date, with authors' names.
-Andrew Fischer - Initially, I came up with a list of articles from a wide range of categories: scientific, musical, literature, pop culture, internet culture, computer, historical, etc. I began research, and came up with another category: self describing. I found an article on Wikipedia about Wikipedia, so I am going to compare what Wikipedia says about itself, KNOL, and Britannica to what KNOL says about all three, and to what Britannica says about all three. For this part of the project, I'll also have to find sources outside of all three to find some kind of control to compare all three too. Initially, I was working on the first part, but now I will focus my energies on the second part as it may be a better judge of the character of the sites they describe (if Wikipedia's self describing page is full of errors or falsities, then perhaps the encyclopedia has less integrity then initially hoped.
