BBC News - Wiki wars: Do Wikipedia's internal tiffs deter newcomers?

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-08-08

Summary:

"As WikiMania, the annual conference for the Wikipedia faithful, gets under way, there is bound to be much back-slapping over the successes of an encyclopaedia that has become, in the words of one devotee, 'part of the assumed plumbing of society'. But behind the scenes, or rather behind the screens, lies a world of incessant cyber-bickering, in which some editors of the site conduct 'battles to the death for insanely low stakes' - as veteran contributor David Gerard puts it. He is referring to the infamous 'edit wars', in which the volunteers who spend hours creating and policing Wikipedia - affectionately known as Wikipedians - clash over the minutiae within the site's 30 million or so pages. For a start, Wikipedians are roughly divided into two camps: the 'inclusionists', who believe the more information on the site, the better, even if the facts may be less well referenced as a consequence and the 'deletionists', who would prefer that only the most relevant and fully verifiable facts appear ..."

Link:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28426674

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) ยป abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.wikimania oa.events oa.wikipedia oa.wikimedia

Date tagged:

08/08/2014, 15:27

Date published:

08/08/2014, 11:27