Views of Wikipedia are decidedly mixed in academia, though perhaps trending slowly from mostly negative to grudgingly positive. But regardless of your view of Wikipedia—or your political persuasion—you can’t help but be impressed with the activity that occurs on the site for current events. (The same holds only slightly less true for non-current events, as […]
Category Archives: Wikis
Digital Campus #30 – Live From Egypt!
On this week’s podcast, we were lucky to have a live link to Liam Wyatt in Alexandria, Egypt. Liam is a co-host of Wikipedia Weekly and was attending Wikimania 2008. Tom, Mills, and I covered Wikipedia in the very first episode of Digital Campus, and if anything it has become an even hotter topic on […]
Wikipedia and Artificial Intelligence
Two years ago in this space, I mused about the potential of Wikipedia as the foundation of high quality data mining and search tools, including for historical research. (I also ran a test, the results of which were mixed, but promising.) Now comes a workshop entitled “Wikipedia and Artificial Intelligence: An Evolving Synergy,” at the […]
The American Historical Association’s Archives Wiki
The American Historical Association has come up with a great idea for a wiki: a website that details the contents of historical archives around the world and includes information about visiting and using those archives. As with any wiki, historians and other researchers can improve the contents of the site by collaboratively editing pages. The […]
The Heavy Metal Umlaut: A History (and Wiki Tale)
Looking for a great way to teach students and colleagues about how a wiki works? In this insightful and often hilarious screencast, Jon Udell traces the development of an improbably thorough Wikipedia article covering the mysterious umlauts that began to show up on rock band names in the 1970s.
The Perfect and the Good Enough: Books and Wikis
As you may have noticed, I haven’t posted to my blog for an entire month. I have a good excuse: I just finished the final edits on my forthcoming book, Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith, due out early next year. (I realized too late that I could have capitalized on Da Vinci […]
What Would You Do With a Million Books?
What would you do with a million digital books? That’s the intriguing question this month’s D-Lib Magazine asked its contributors, as an exercise in understanding what might happen when massive digitization projects from Google, the Open Content Alliance, and others reach their fruition. I was lucky enough to be asked to write one of the […]
Wikipedia vs. Encyclopaedia Britannica Keyword Shootout Results
In my post “Wikipedia vs. Encyclopaedia Britannica for Digital Research”, I asked you to compare two lists of significant keywords and phrases, derived from matching articles on George H. W. Bush in Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Which one is a better keyword profile—a data mining list that could be used to find other documents […]
Wikipedia vs. Encyclopaedia Britannica for Digital Research
In a prior post I argued that the recent coverage of Wikipedia has focused too much on one aspect of the online reference source’s openness—the ability of anyone to edit any article—and not enough on another aspect of Wikipedia’s openness—the ability of anyone to download or copy the entire contents of its database and use […]
The Wikipedia Story That’s Being Missed
With all of the hoopla over Wikipedia in the recent weeks (covered in two prior posts), most of the mainstream as well as tech media coverage has focused on the openness of the democratic online encyclopedia. Depending on where you stand, this openness creates either a Wild West of publishing, where anything goes and facts […]
