When I checked on the Wikipedia article I edited and discussed in last week’s post, I was surprised that the additions I made were edited out. Although, the picture I posted was retained, it was given a new caption. I tried reverting the history to my edits, but in less than a day the person who edited it out put it back in. The reason stated on the edit summary was that the membership information I added can be found on the California Academy of Sciences website and is not appropriate with the tone of the article, which is, to my mind, an editorial judgment. Anyway, the reason I mentioned this is to illustrate the devotion of users of public wikis, like Wikipedia, to maintain the editorial integrity of articles in the site similar to what Jon Udell chronicled in his screencasting of the history of the heavy metal umlaut article. I find it interesting that there really exist devoted users of wikis that police the articles to maintain its content’s relevancy. And apparently, this editorial zealousness does not only extend to spam or vandalism, but also to keep articles uniform in tone. This devotion of the users of public wikis underscore the social software aspect of wikis and also opens up possibilities of how wikis can be a tool for public libraries to assist their constituencies in coming up with their own resource guide of their community based on their own experience and information that they find important.
#1 by Dawn on February 23rd, 2009
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This is very interesting–thanks for sharing! It kind of makes me uneasy that there are these dedicated individuals guarding the knowledge that is supposed to be created by many. It is great that they are trying to preserve the editorial integrity of the article and in most cases they probably make it better, but still… I guess it is not much worse than reading a published article or book where the author and editor have complete control, but wikis come to us under the guise of a “community” creation. Makes me wonder how much “community” is really there in each article.
#2 by admin on February 23rd, 2009
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And it can be frustrating too that someone can just undo all the effort you put into writing and formatting an addition to an article.