For the first time ever, I decided to allow my students to work on a Wikibook project. Normally, my tech comm seniors (Univ. of Minnesota) have to do a community service project. In the past, they have prepared manuals and materials for "Dress for Success," "Helping Hands," and "The Immigration Project" among other non-profits. Service learning as part of tech comm reflects a general philosophy within the UofM that students should do 20 hours of community participation.

During my trip to CW2006, I found myself reading Wired and Scientific American. Both had articles promoting the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and its various offspring. The Wired article indicated that the PLoS is now more influential in some areas of genetic research than any printed journal. In fact, there have been signs that the printed journals are falling out of favor with science departments for reasons of cost and reputation: too many journals include sponsored research with suspect data.

The PLoS is supported by a $1500 submission fee. This fee covers the cost of three readers, selected by the editors, and the costs of maintaining servers. There was also a MacArthur Foundation grant of $3 million that started the project to cover setup costs and legal research fees. 

This is from InfoWorld (www.infoworld.com):

October 21, 2005
Wikipedia: Maybe the masses aren't asses, after all

So, the news this week was that Wikipedia's founder admitted it has "serious quality problems." In part a response to Nick Carr's scathing rebuke of the rise of the amateur class, also picked up by InfoWorld.

Wikipedia being what it is, it actually has an encyclopedia entry called "Criticism of Wikipedia". There's something about that candor that you just have to love.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I wonder how valid all of this criticism is. I'm no deconstructionist (spent all my grad school years fighting against such limp-minded buffoonery), but despite my initial going with the flow ("It stinks! I've smelled it!!") I'm wondering if the criticism is misplaced.

During the last academic year, many of my fellow teaching assistants (and full-time faculty) struggled with Blackboard. The primary issue was the desire of most users to type in another application, then paste the results into discussion boards. The results tend to be a mess. High-ASCII and Unicode characters become question marks, formats are lost, and everyone gripes.

I tended to prefer using Nvu, which works pretty well on my PowerBook. I'd paste the resulting HTML into Blackboard, and all was good. However, this is not a practical solution when dealing with 84 instructors and more than 6,000 English 1 students.

Wikipedia, like the Los Angeles Times "Open Ed", New York Review of Books "User Notes", and other "open" editorial forums meant for peer editing and corrections, is now a frequent victim of vandals. The end result of this is a move to end, close, or limit user interactions.

This same thing is happening with some Open Source projects, after some "contributions" turned out to include intentional buffer errors or other security issues. In any open society...

From Reuters, 5-Aug-2005:

Wikipedia plans to impose stricter editorial rules to prevent vandalism of its content, founder Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying Friday.

In an interview with German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung, Wales, who launched Wikipedia with partner Larry Sanger in 2001, said it needed to find a balance between protecting information from abuse and providing open access to improve entries.

Citing a recent example of vandalism, Wales recalled how following the election of the new Pope Benedict in April, a user substituted the pontiff's photo on the Wikipedia site with that of the evil emperor from the "Star Wars" film series.

Because the thread on the CC drifted into creativity, I thought this might be of interest. The researcher began her work at Harvard and has been expanding it for almost a decade:

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/booksellers/press_release/flaherty/

In The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (Houghton Mifflin, January), neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the hows and whys of writing, revealing the science behind hypergraphia. Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase, while others, hunched over a notepad or keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing?

The New York Times has a good essay by Richard Posner on the effects of choice on the traditional media and journalism. He looks specifically at blogging and its self-correcting nature.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/books/review/31POSNER.html

He echoes many of my concerns about the echo effect. It is a myth that people read the news to become better informed. The audience dictates the news more than people realize. No audience, no advertisers, no station or newspaper, as Posner documents. (Even a political publication needs financial support from someone.)

Blogs do not face the same need for a larger audience.