Reflections on Wikipedia

I never thought very highly of Wikipedia, especially when my former students (and we are talking university students) often used it as their main source for research papers, and/or copied verbatim from it.  It struck me as being similar to using an Encyclopedia, and what a shame when there were dozens of sources written by known experts on a given subject.  I'm beginning to rethink my attitudes towards it, however, as I find myself using it more and more to find information, especially as an initial source. I would never ever ever think of using it as a source in a bibliography though, unless it was a research paper on Wikipedia.  The way in which Wikipedia uses information and produces knowledge, in a collaborative effort, that can be changed, edited, and corrected, or totally rewritten is also appealing.   Vannevar Bush in 1945 predicted this collaborative research and production of knowledge in his article originally published in the Atlantic Journal.  As a scientist, he predicted many technological innovations, writing that "a records if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted."   He suggested that in the future, encyclopedias could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox.  Although I think he was considering microfilm (which is already outdated and extinct), yet he also writes about pressing buttons which would enable readers to consult library books "with greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf."  Was he imagining Google Books? He certainly predicted the creation of Wikipedia, writing that "new forms of encyclopedias will appear," with specialists (or self-proclaimed ones) writing with "associative trails" about given subjects.  Isn't this what Wiki is? A new kind of encyclopedia, where all kinds of people collaborate together, and where links can take readers to associated subjects? The featured entry now about the 2014 FIFA World Cup has links to the reunification of Germany, winning teams in previous years, players, controversies, protests, injuries, etc. Not exactly the dry entry that one might find in the Encyclopedia Britannica, is it?

Information is Beautiful

And the winner of the Information is Beautiful Award is....A Day in the Life of a New York City Taxi, displaying the data of a single NYC taxi driver over a single day in 2013. You can see where the taxi went, how much money it made and how busy it was or wasn't over a 24 hour period in a single day. 

Another Information is Beautiful Award went to this experiment.  Not clear what the assumptions are here, but the data scientist here said that Shakespeare used 28,829 words in his corpus, suggesting that his vocabulary was around 100,000 words.  Do hip hop artists have a similarly large knowledge of the English language? Examining the first 35,000 words of 85 hip hop artists, based on examining 3 to 5 studio albums and EPS of each artist, the results are riveting! Revered hip hop artists such as 2Pac and Snoop Dogg were only in the bottom 20% in terms of their vocabulary!

 This concept of "visualizing information" seems very new, but in many ways, it's really just making a map of information and turning it into knowledge that is visual and easy to grasp. 

Changing the subject, the concept of peer production and sharing as we see in Wikipedia, as described by Benkler in his book The Wealth of Networks has a particular appeal to the digital generation.  I've edited a few Wikipedia entries. My doing so wasn't based on a desire to share information, but rather to correct misconceptions.  Although the digital generation might view Wikipedia as the ultimate source, being from the generation of digital migrants, I still tend to question the information in Wikipedia, and although I can see how many times an entry has been edited, and who has done the editing, I prefer to get my information from known experts. That being said, Wikipedia is a great starting point for looking up something that I don't know anything about. 

What you do, where you are and who you meet, and if you've seen my message has become public information

In response to changes to Whatsapp's privacy settings, and the two blue checkmarks indicating that the messages have been seen and read, there are already tricks to bypassing these changes: http://www.deccanchronicle.com/141108/technology-mobiles-and-tabs/article/how-avoid-whatsapps-blue-ticks.

For as long as I can remember, Facebook has similar privacy issues, where it reads "seen" if the message has been read.  Of course, these can lead to all kinds of problems between people, especially if somebody is expecting an answer, but doesn't receive one.  Of greater concern is the ability to track people via their GPS, and to see where they are during chats.  I recently spoke (chatted) with somebody from the Palestinian Authority who lacks a permit to come into Israel.  The chats indicated his location as being in Mevasseret.  In fact, I was able to open a map and see exactly on what street he was. I don't think this was information that this person wanted to share with me, and it made me immediately turn off my location settings on Facebook for the same reason. Nobody on Facebook chat needs to know my whereabouts.


And now, where are Israel's Ministers and members of Knesset, and what are they doing to promote public interests? We can now know via their online appointment calendars, posted a week later, thanks to the efforts of the Movement for Freedom of Information.  But no surprises here, Yair Lapid's calendar shows a lot of appointments that he didn't want us to know about, while Minister of Housing, Uri Ariel submitted a practically blank calendar. Apparently he doesn't want us to know who he has been meeting with  (for those of us who follow the news in East Jerusalem, we can guess). 



Yesterday's class discussion on Nonaka's SECI model left me confused about the case study that we are to turn in. I had thought that since most knowledge is tacit, the best option for the Ontario Ministry of Education might be the "communities of practice," where employees can share their knowledge with one another.  However, upon learning about SECI and reading Nonaka's article, I am beginning to think that this is not the case.  According to Nonaka, "Organizational knowledge creation, as distinct from individual knowledge creation, takes place when all four modes of knowledge creation are 'organizationally' managed to form a continual cycle." (p.20).  There is no beginning to this model, and no end point.  As it's cyclical, each form of knowledge conversion can serve the needs of an organization, and are all equally important.