Working Wikipedia

Wikipedia, which describes itself as “The Free Encyclopedia” is in effect a collaboratively built information database (encyclopaedia) which can be freely viewed or edited by the general public (assuming internet access). The degree of freedom has varied over the 8 years of the project’s development, with early stages being closer to the “absolute” freedom that Wikipedia targets. Since it’s massive rise in popularity (it is currently the 8th most visited site in Australia), the freedom which is allowed on the site has declined as order has been established. This is to be expected however as anarchy and chaos often mean the same thing. What Wikipedia aims to achieve now is a “free-content encyclopedia”, with freedom of editing available to the vast majority of pages, having a select few pages with edit restrictions to help prevent vandalism of the site.

The whole concept behind Wikipedia being established as a “free encyclopaedia” which “anyone can edit” has in many ways been the cause of many of its problems. One of these problems is vandalism. Vandalism (in the context of Wikipedia) has been described by Wikipedia itself:

Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s article on vandalism goes on to explain what key instances of vandalism are. A large proportion of vandalism such as what the article describes as “silly vandalism” and “blanking” are usually quickly reverted back to their previous condition. One was that this can occur is the discovery of vandalism by readers. I personally edit Wikipedia (my contributions) and I usually take this approach to reverting vandalism. Other ways vandalism is patrolled is through users utilising Wikipedia’s watchpage feature, which lists recent edits to pages that a particular user is “watching”; or alternatively through watching the general recent changes page and watching all updates that occur to any article on Wikipedia. As hundreds of edits can occur each minute, this task tends to be quite large and users tend to mainly target edits by anonymous users which is the source for the majority of vandalism. A user may also try to check every page edited in the space of a particular minute for vandalism. Users who utilise the recent changes feature regularly to patrol pages are often known (endearingly) by the Wikipedia community as Wikipediholics.

An artistic work referring to users contributing to Wikipedia in their "area's of expertise". Part of a series by Mike E. Perez (quartermane) on Flickr.

The creation and editing of articles on Wikipedia is undertaken by the large Wikipedia community. Anyone who has contributed to Wikipedia (with positive intentions) can be considered as part of the community. Contributors usually focus on their particular areas of expertise. Often these areas can warrant becoming a member of a WikiProject. WikiProjects are an important part of the Wikipedia community, with their goal to manage and enhance a topic, covering groups of articles.  WikiProjects exist for many topics including Architecture, Military History and Pornography. Many of my contributions to Wikipedia have been through WikiProject Brisbane.

While Wikipedia is by no means perfect, the majority of information on the site is factual and well verified. The reason behind its success has been the community which has built and continue to build the way Wikipedia works, setting up guidelines and processes in order to achieve this. It is the community that makes Wikipedia work.

The Rising Influence of Citizen Journalism

In the last five years citizen journalism has been reshaping the media landscape. What citizen journalism is excactly is fairly acurately described by its title; journalism by normal citizens, as opposed to paid journalists through large scale traditional media companies. Citizen journalism is one of the factors which is leading to the decline of newspapers. The internet has facilitated the development of citizen journalism and has allowed its influence to spread. By allowing everyone with internet access to participate in the journalistic community, it has caused major changes to the way we access news and where news comes from.

Blogs are just one form that citizen journalism takes. Whilst a number of blogs don’t necessarily contain news, a large percentage of blogs are journalistic in nature. This blog for instance is journalistic in some aspects, whilst being mostly academic and not really containing what is traditionally referred to as news. Many other blogs work in the same way, combining news with opinion and research. Blogs have an advantage over traditional journalistic mediums in a variety of ways. Firstly, blogs have a tendancy to focus on one induvidual topic, as opposed to appealing to a general audience. Secondly, an entire history of blog posts can be easilly searched, or viewed in chronological order. Thirdly a blog can be accessed easilly in other places through the usage of RSS feed readers. Its these advantages that are contributing heavilly to the usage of blogs as news and journalism sources.

The US Airways Flight 1549 crash into the Hudson River in New York was widely reported in citizen journalism. Photo by Chris Gardener (via username: USACEpublicaffairs) on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.

Micro-blogging site Twitter is also being increasingly used for citizen journalism. One significant example of the site as a journalistic platform has been during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India late last year. People on the scene were updating the site in real time via their mobile phones with details of events as they happened. Twitter was also used in the US Airways plane crash into the Hudson River in New York which occurred earlier this year. In both these instances people watching updates could find out events instantly, which is beyond the capacity of most news outlets. Twitter was not the only social medium used during these and other major events. Photos from the Mumbai attacks were uploaded to photo sharing site Flickr, with one user, Vinukumar Ranganathan (username: Vinu), posting 112 photos. It’s during unexpected events such as these that citizen journalism has significant advantage over the major news outlets, due to the concept of journalists being everywhere.

Blogging and other forms of citizen journalism allow internet users to consume journalism in more efficient ways. Citizen journalists are also able to report on major sudden events, providing real time insights that could not be achieved through traditional journalism. Its these advantages, along with others that are causing the increase in citizen journalism’s influence.