In celebration of Black History Month, Cambridge College will host a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on Tuesday, February 25, 2020 from 5:00pm - 7:00pm in the Town Common. This event is aligned with the theme for the spring 2020 term Spaces and Places. Specific pages to be edited will be significant locations in New England with a special emphasis on Massachusetts.
Wikipedia U by
Since its launch in 2001, Wikipedia has been a lightning rod for debates about knowledge and traditional authority. It has come under particular scrutiny from publishers of print encyclopedias and college professors, who are skeptical about whether a crowd-sourced encyclopedia--in which most entries are subject to potentially endless reviewing and editing by anonymous collaborators whose credentials cannot be established--can ever truly be accurate or authoritative. In Wikipedia U, Thomas Leitch argues that the assumptions these critics make about accuracy and authority are themselves open to debate. After all, academics are expected both to consult the latest research and to return to the earliest sources in their field, each of which has its own authority. And when teachers encourage students to master information so that they can question it independently, their ultimate goal is to create a new generation of thinkers and makers whose authority will ultimately supplant their own. Wikipedia U offers vital new lessons about the nature of authority and the opportunities and challenges of Web 2.0. Leitch regards Wikipedia as an ideal instrument for probing the central assumptions behind liberal education, making it more than merely, as one of its severest critics has charged, "the encyclopedia game, played online."
Good Faith Collaboration by
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is built by a community--a community of Wikipedians who are expected to assume good faith when interacting with one another. In Good Faith Collaboration, Joseph Reagle examines this unique collaborative culture. Wikipedia, says Reagle, is not the first effort to create a freely shared, universal encyclopedia; its early twentieth-century ancestors include Paul Otlet's Universal Repository and H. G. Wells's proposal for a World Brain. Both these projects, like Wikipedia, were fuelled by new technology--which at the time included index cards and microfilm. What distinguishes Wikipedia from these and other more recent ventures is Wikipedia's good-faith collaborative culture, as seen not only in the writing and editing of articles but also in their discussion pages and edit histories.
Textual Curation by
Wikipedia is arguably the most famous collaboratively written text of our time, but few know that nearly three hundred years ago Ephraim Chambers proposed an encyclopedia written by a wide range of contributors--from illiterate craftspeople to titled gentry. Chambers wrote that incorporating information submitted by the public would considerably strengthen the second edition of his well-received Cyclop#65533;dia, which relied on previously published information. In Textual Curation, Krista Kennedy examines the editing and production histories of the Cyclop#65533;dia and Wikipedia, the ramifications of robot-written texts, and the issues of intellectual property theory and credit. Kennedy also documents the evolution of both encyclopedias as well as the participation of central players in discussions about the influence of technology and collaboration in early modern and contemporary culture. Through this comparative study, based on extensive archival research and data-driven analysis, Kennedy illuminates the deeply situated nature of authorship, which is dependent on cultural approval and stable funding sources as much as it is on original genius and the ownership of intellectual property. Kennedy's work significantly revises long-held notions of authorial agency and autonomy, establishing the continuity of new writing projects such as wikis with longstanding authorial practices that she calls textual curation. This study examines a wide range of texts that recompose accepted knowledge into reliable, complex reference works combining contributions of article text alongside less commonly considered elements such as metadata vocabularies, cross-indexing, and the development of print and digital interfaces. Comparison of analog and networked texts also lays bare the impact of technological developments, both in the composing process and in the topics that can practically be included in such a text. By examining the human and technological curators that support these encyclopedias as well as the discourses that surround them, Kennedy develops textual curation as a longstanding theory and process that offers a nuanced construction of authorship.
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