Christopher Foster wrote: >On the subject of Wikipedia, I saw this interesting piece in EthanZ's blog today >(http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ethan/) that has particular relevance to the digital >divide: > >"Amazing though it is, Wikipedia is not flawless. It's got a problem common to almost >all peer production projects: people work on what they want to work on... > >Most of the people who work on Wikipedia are white, male technocrats from the US and >Europe. They're especially knowledgeable about certain subjects - technology, science >fiction, libertarianism, life in the US/Europe - and tend to write about these >subjects. As a result, the resource tends to be extremely deep on technical topics >and shallow in other areas. Nigeria's brilliant author, Chinua Achebe gets a 1582 >byte "stub" of an article, while the GSM mobile phone standard gets 16,500 bytes of >main entry, with dozens of related articles. > >This caught the eye of Wikipedia contributor Xed, who identified this as a systemic, >structural bias in the Wikipedia system. He's launched a project called CROSSBOW - >Committee Regarding Overcoming Serious Systemic Bias On Wikipedia - which is looking >for ways to address these biases and increase the number of articles on less-covered >topics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Xed/CROSSBOW)" > > >Chris Foster > >
The same could be done by encouraging people to contribute. You'll note in the article, emphasis mine...: 'Taran Rampersad *didn't* *complain* when he failed to find anything on his hometown in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Instead, he simply wrote his own entry for San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago." My answer is - the same one I gave at CARDICIS (http://www.cardidicis.org) when people complained of the same - "Write. Quit talking and write". Apparently I practice what I preach. Isn't it odd that the people described as the majority of people who work on the Wikipedia... isn't it odd that it's the same majority that has internet access? How completely odd. It couldn't be a coincidence. Complaining about insufficient representation is irrelevant when the people complaining aren't contributing - or aren't helping other than pointing out that the people without access aren't contributing. Once people have access to the internet, they can contribute freely - without prejudice. With the Wikipedia, the problem is mostly the Digital Divide - not the other way around. Want to fix this bias? Get more people on the internet. It's that simple. It costs me $80 US/month to have these discussions on a small 128K ADSL line - and I'm doing good. Think about it. If people want to write history, they need to take ownership of their pens. Making those pens more available... *that* is the digital divide. -- Taran Rampersad [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linuxgazette.com http://www.a42.com http://www.worldchanging.com http://www.knowprose.com http://www.easylum.net " It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom."â Rollo May _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
