Internet: Knowledge and Community

at The Evergreen State College

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Class discussion 01/12 quotes

Let's make changes ~ everything is reversible

If no one adds anything there will be nothing to change

It just has to be good enough

Is it pretty clear on where we can go next on this project?

What we're going for here is moving from personal entries into a collaborative project, at some point the lines between peoples' personal work will have to be blurred and then destroyed

(whatever it is) It's a possibility . . .


An argument against the wikipedia model: The topic of whether Wikipedia would be a good source to emulate in our own wiki project came up in last Saturday's wiki check in/workshop. There are a couple of things about their standard page conventions and editing workflow which make me think it would not be a good model for our own Community & Knowledge Wiki. Wikipedia's goal is to create highly factual encyclopedia articles from a worldwide network of professional enthusiasts. This goal shapes their entire community inquiry from their article structure to their collaborative workflow and page improvement procedures. Since our community inquiry is of a much different scope and knowledge base, it doesn't seem likely that Wikipedia's model would fit our needs.

My individual thoughts on structuring this wiki: If we want to know the best way for us to organize ourselves and work together to build a body of knowledge, it seems any shared values or collective points of interest would be important things to consider. Since we all signed up for a class on how community & knowledge relate to the internet, I would guess many off us see the rapidly emerging technology and connectivity as a great potential force which could/has change(d) both of these fields drastically in our lifetime. If we can, as a group, formulate this and any other shared values (personal liberty, equality?) into some sort of project statement, it would help us develop what type of collective body of knowledge we want to develop that reflects us as a community.

~Michael O'Neill


All good points OP, I'm just going to add some other suggestions and questions. First while this isn't an immediate issue there are still questions without responses on the wiki. I know there was a suggestion to archive unanswered questions, but I would think it would be nice if each question had one or two responses for the sake of fairness in the early stages. That way at least everyone can at least take ways that from the wiki. I think if everyone in class could respond to at least three different questions by the end of week 3 we could start thinking about changing the questions to full articles.

Also on the note of changing from Q&A format to articles should each person take the responsibility of changing their page to an article format? Or will it evolve by it's self though edits and additions? Another question is, if a question discussion gives birth to a topic/question that has a lot of content could it be possible to make a new page or will it just have a brief section under the original question?

Overall I think the wiki is coming out well. Good work guys.

~Michael O'Callaghan (The "other" Michael)


Just a Quick Thought

For those of us who attended this class during Fall quarter, should we upload our position papers to this Wiki and link them? These papers asked us to take a position on the significance of the Internet and write and support a thesis on this topic.

I have already uploaded my paper to this site, but one can only link to it from my profile page. In my paper, I argued that the Internet is the new oral culture in a sense. Let me know if uploading some papers from last quarter sounds like a good idea.

My paper: Position Paper from Fall Quarter

-Robert Price


Robert, if you think your paper is related to any of the topics (and your description makes it sound that way) you should add a link to it under that topic. I'm looking forward to reading it and any other papers from last quarter.

-Michael O'Neill