Wikipedia … an academic source or a website to steal knowledge? Will Richardson explains that this emerged knowledge space is “the poster child for the collaborative construction of knowledge and truth that the new, interactive Web facilitates”—the collaboratively created and edited online encyclopedia. So have you hung up your Wikipedia poster yet? I know I have!
I believe the phenomenon of this website came about because people were too lazy to read a book.
Wikipedia is by no means the first encyclopedia to take to cyberspace but has become the most successful online encyclopedia both in terms of its userbase and the breadth of its coverage—it is the ring leader for the produsage world. What has made it such a success was that it clearly embraces produsage principles implementation citizens to edit and participant in the website, without even signing a registration account (Bruns, 2008).
Produsers are creating an artistic environment where they are collaborating collective intelligence generated through the website. The website is not just any other site, but a production of knowledge through an emerged class of users in control of the function of the website. These people known as Wikipedians, all have jobs such as readers, editors, administrators, patrollers, policy makers, subject area experts, content maintainers, software developers, system operators and many more (Bruns, 2008, 116). This wide range of people within the website are just produsers creating a space where they are allowed to write, edit, argue and appraise, educating anyone and everyone.
Wikipedia’s produsage processes does not allow for the emergence of individual personality in the texts presented through the site. What Wikipedia offers instead is the voice of a collective; not of the collective entirety of its millions of users, but of the hive mind composed o the many individuals, fluid, and constantly evolving communities gathers around any one of it entries (Bruns, 2008, 133).
It is often critiqued for not being educational because active contributors to Wikipedia and casual user’s highlights the question of whether the information is providing quality and accuracy resources to the audience. This then raises the question that the users contributing, known as a citizen journalist, have a wide range of information, knowledge literacy and capacity to educate others.
I say if you know what your are talking about girl/boy friend let your knowledge grace others. In some of my subjects I will get told “Wikipedia is not a credible source” and I have never has the guts to say “oh yeah it actually is!” Citizen journalists would not be providing incorrect information for the fun of it. People participate in the online encyclopedia because being a produser lets you engage in a subject you are passionate about.
An understanding of Wikipedia requires an understanding that the knowledge you are receiving could not be all that correct, but the content produsage has influenced open participation and communal evaluation of contributors on the range and quality of a collaborate subject.
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