Planet Wicipedia
July 21st, 2009
There’s a nice little English-language article “Look it up in Wicipedia” published in the latest issue of Planet (195, pp 27-31) written by Craig Owen Jones from Bangor University (startling that such a fresh-faced young man should have responsibility for Punk Rock!).
The article makes a number of interesting points…
...including some ideas on how to measure the “quality” of a Wikipedia, suggesting a measure of “depth” (described as a “rough index of its collaborativeness”) based on number of edits, number of users, and number of stub pages. I’m not entirely sold on this as a measure of “quality” per se, but it does have some resonance for me in terms of thinking about the community of people involved rather than simply about the content itself.
It also mentions a campaign organised via Wicipedias Caffi section, to boost the number of articles. Similar campaigns appear to have been successful for Catalan. However, simply boosting the number of articles doesn’t necessarily make Wicipedia any better (depending on how we define “better” I suppose).
I agree with Craig that Wicipedia is important – or at least it has the potential to be important. He suggests that “presence is power” and whilst I kind of agree with him, there is also the danger that presence may be purely symbolic if it is not combined with use. Beyond the issue of use is the issue of effect – if a Welsh speaking pupil goes to Wicipedia to read about the moon landings and the article is poorly written or insufficiently detailed, they are very likely to go to the equivalent Wikipedia article. Next time they want some information, will they bother with Wicipedia or just go straight to Wikipedia?
Wicipedia is just one of a number of opportunities for Welsh language use on the internet, many of which appear to hold potential for language maintenance, however I am beginning to wonder about the extent to which this potential is actually being realised.
Posted by djcunlif | Tagged with Wikipediae, wikipediae, wikis
2 Responses to “Planet Wicipedia”
Sorry, comments are closed for this article.
July 22nd, 2009 at 05:42 AM >>however I am beginning to wonder about the extent to which this potential is actually being realised<< And thus you have the crux of my dissertation, or at least where I'm trying to go! I'm not sure how much I agree that number of edits = better quality argument either, especially since in some English language cases, a high number of page edits represents vandalism and repairs to that vandalism, not necessarily adding/improving information, etc. Thanks for pointing this article out; I'll add it to my list of ones to read!
July 22nd, 2009 at 04:03 PM I will certainly have to read the article in full (@Courtney - there's usually a copy of Planet in Cardiff Central Library, and maybe in Cardiff Uni's Main Arts Library). I don't know either if number of edits is a good measure of an article's quality, although by looking at the stats for most edited pages, it does seem that the actual articles at the top of the list (excluding Talk Pages and such) do seem like the most substantial. So far, the Welsh Wicipedia doesn't seem to suffer from edit wars like the the English Wikipeadia does - in fact it's all very polite! Vandalism is also minimal and is easily spotted on the 'recent changes' page. Depth of articles is certainly an issue, and it's one that isn't much discussed in Y Caffi; the priority always seem to be to increase number of articles. Also a lot of time is spent be editors correcting grammar and spelling as there is a varying degree of fluency among all contributors, although all editors ar keen to encourage speakers of all level to contribute.