Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education/Chapter 1/What is the philosophy of Wikipedia? 1

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The Philosophy of Wikipedia

Students in the Wiki course are presented a new challenge, and that is to take new knowledge or understanding of information from research, synthesize the content with valid sources, be progressive in publishing your own 1000 word edited essay, and watch as the text takes shape in four short weeks. *Remember, the more time and effort you put into your article, the less likely it is that someone will find a major flaw with it. At the same time, great effort and planning cannot and should not guarantee that your article will not be edited at all. After all, universal editing power is one of the most progressive elements of the Wiki system. You, the student, in a unique experience of extrapolation of philosophies editing and publishing ideas of your fellow students in a collaborative effort, and together create the 301 Wiki experience, and the classroom text. Maybe this last sentence could be more easily understood if it read something like this, “You, the student, will have the unique opportunity to create, publish and edit your own work as well as that of your classmates during the process of writing your own course textbook, while at the same time familiarizing yourself with many different philosophies and ideas – an opportunity that is, notably, absent from standard interactions with traditional textbooks".

To gain an understanding of the editing process, it is essential that you understand the history of “Wikipedia”. “Wikipedia” is the spawn of its antecedent, Nupedia, a program designed to include millions of articles and pages worldwide with content produced by hundreds of thousands of contributors with many different backgrounds – educational, national and cultural including ten- year-old middle school students, tenured university professors, or even upper level sales representative, just to name a few. On January 15th, 2001, also known as “Wikiday” by fellow contributors, was the creation of the domain name for www.Wikipedia.com. Below is the foundation as described by wikipedia:

Wikipedia® was founded as a feeder project for Nupedia, an earlier (now defunct) project founded by Jimmy Wales to produce a free encyclopedia. Nupedia had an elaborate multi-step peer review process, and required highly qualified contributors. The writing of articles was slow throughout 2000, the first year that project was online, despite having a mailing list of interested editors and a full-time editor-in-chief, Larry Sanger. During Nupedia's first year, Wales and Sanger discussed various ways to supplement Nupedia with a more open, complementary project. Jeremy Rosenfeld, a Bomis employee, introduced Wales to the concept of a wiki. Independently, Ben Kovitz, a computer programmer and regular on Ward Cunningham's wiki (the WikiWikiWeb), introduced Sanger to wikis over dinner on January 2, 2001. Sanger thought a wiki would be a good platform to use, and proposed that a UseModWiki (then v. 0.90) be set up for Nupedia. Wales set one up and put it online on January 10.

Wikipedia’s development has faced many obstacles and hurdles to overcome, but the program remains extant, provided everyone places ample time and effort into the system. An example of Wikipedia facing adversity comes from its blocks on information by some other countries’ governments. Although there have been minor restrictions on usage and bans on individual articles, Wikipedia’s source accuracy is strong compared with that of Encyclopedia Britannica and Encarta. Wikipedia has expanded to a global realm, and now most anyone has the ability to be published and have credit to his/her own name for posting an article.

In May 2001, the first wave of non-English versions of Wikipedia were launched (in Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, German, Esperanto, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish) followed closely by Arabic and Hungarian. In September (2001), Wiki leaders made a further commitment to the multilingual provision of Wikipedia. At the end of the year, when international statistics first began to be logged, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serb-Croatian versions were announced.

Chronological timeline of 2006 achievements of Wikipedia®

• January 4: The English language version of Wikipedia® arrived at the 900,000-article mark.
• January 10: Wikipedia® became a registered trademark of Wikimedia Foundation.
• January 15: Wikipedia celebrated its fifth birthday.
• January 30: Wikipedia registered editors were made to require a non-blank password.
• February 28: The one-millionth-user account was registered for the English language edition.
• March 1: The English language Wikipedia passed the 1,000,000 article mark.
• March 19: Following a vote, the Main Page of the English language Wikipedia featured its first redesign in nearly two years.
• March 28: CBS Evening News airs a special report about Wikipedia.
• April 4: The first CD selection in English was published as a free download (see Wikipedia: Wikipedia-CD/Download.)

Sidebar

"Lost at Sea"

There is a necessity to organization of information, but anyone can strive to be an expert of knowledge on a topic, allowing information to flow free from multi-tapped resources leaving an editable product where knowledge can be understood, altered, and refined. I don’t get this sentence.

No matter the issue, global warming, terrorism, famine, avian flue, the nature of love, the location of a housing development, the existence of being after death, or the care for frail elders, once you begin to include into your thinking all the information that could potentially illuminate your subject, you’ll see the necessity to look at technology, science, sociology, folk-lore, religion, psychology, anthropology, media, personalities, experience, politics, big picture, up close, history, current events, side perspectives, future predictions and so on out into an ever expanding universe of relevance. Before you know it, you are awash in a sea of information where the more you learn the less you understand. And despite the availability of sophisticated data mining techniques and even more intelligent search engines, the sheer volume of information coming at us from everywhere at accelerating speed in different languages, epistemologies and assumptive frames, sometimes contradictory sometimes complimentary means that even if we had the most extravagant and efficient computers with data mining techniques to process data in order to determine what is true fact or knowledge. I don’t get that last sentence either. Did you mean something like, “And despite the availability of…the sheer volume of … produces results that are sometimes complimentary and sometimes contradictory, and this would be the case, even if we had access to the most extravagant…” We experience information overload; yet, at the same time there is a widening realization of how much we do not know, or the possibilities of what we can produce and what we are capable of knowing. We need information to understand our information; we do not always agree on perspectives, priorities, discipline, epistemology, metaphysics, and metaphors, or values. This notion allows us to question morality in the contexts of social or psychological problems;, it allows information to flow like white water, and increasingly one may become lost at sea, but proper sourcing, proper editing and effective resource rendering will produce a strong foundation of knowledge with which one can overcome the oppression of information overloading waves.

Learn to refine searches, when putting together your five source articles, read more than the allotted amount to get the experience of being an expert in your subject contents field.

It is believed by some that human beings shape history; within this notion, presented by Polymath Jaron Zepler Lanier, who has written extensively on the philosophy of consciousness and information, holds that it is well beyond (from pure English, your usage of “without” is absolutely right, but I fear that students will have trouble understanding what you mean) our power to transcend to something far beyond the current understanding of who we are as a species. This means that, with individual efforts of writing and editing, 301 has the ability to change the standard notion that the textbook has to be written by professionals. Instead, students working to be professionals in the teaching venue can produce a completed wiki text. Lanier pictures a “rich and tasty brew of opportunities” in a world where human beings make intelligent, ethical choices, while transcending ideas and altering notions. Information in a system like Wikipedia has the possibility of being an infinite game, where the subjects are the center of attention and, as the game expands, more players will be able to put forth their individual effort. This will expand individuals’ knowledge base and push students in a direction of incentive, cooperation, competition, and representation of their edited articles.

Sources

O’hara, Maureen. (2006)The Search of the Next Enlightenment?: The Challenge for Education in Uncertain Times Journal Of Transformative Education, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 105-11.

Meadows, D. (2005). Dancing with systems. In M. K. Stone & Z. Barlow (Eds.), Ecological literacy: Educating our children for a sustainable world.

Washburn, Allyson M. (2006) Editor’s Perspective: Whithersoever?: Musings about Our Struggles to Thrive in a World with Weird Frogs and Fewer Polar Bears.

Where are the multiple choice questions???

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