Mondo Wikipedia (Village Voice)

[katty]

cont'd at:

http://villagevoice.com/arts/0602,aviv,71632,12.html

excerpt from: Mondo Wikipedia (Village Voice)
by Rachel Aviv

...Self-described Wikipediholics spend several hours a day researching, summarizing, and reinventing the meaning of various concepts. "Everyone wants to learn," says Daniel Mayer, one of the site's top contributors, with more than 40,000 edits. "It's not like the Victorian model of education: one person dictating at the head of the classroom. There's no hierarchy. There's no teacher."

Users form groups (the Harmonious Editing Club, Typo Team, Association of Deletionist Wikipedians) to more efficiently argue over definitions. A recent flame over whether or not the "apple pie" entry should include the phrase "as American as mom and apple pie" went on for months. A British user, "Tagish-simon," accused U.S. contributors of simultaneously colonizing the idea of pie, motherhood, and family. "First Iraq, then Apple Pies. What next?" he wrote. The page had to be blocked, and one person temporarily quit the site. After the dispute died down, someone replaced the old photo with that of a cheesecake.

Clay Shirky, a technology and new-media professor at NYU, describes the site as a mix of political philosophies—"a creamy communist exterior with a crispy libertarian center." Wikipedia forces an uncomfortable issue for academics, he says. "Where does authority come from? Brands? Institutions? It's not so clear. And it never has been. That's why the site is so threatening."

[smirkymonkey]

1. I love Wikipedia - I can spend hours researching things and

then clicking on the hyperlinks which lead me to more new and interesting tidbits and so on...

Wait - Clay Shirky?? Is that his real name?

[NYC Liberal]

2. Me too...you can go from, say, the French Revolution to some 80s movie

just by clicking links. I love it.

Of course, for anything of consequence that I need to cite and whatnot, I tend to use it more as a guideline of where to start/go with it rather than actually using the information there.