Bill Tozier and I went to see Marshall Poe's talk at Eastern. Here's impressionistic notes on it. It's missing most of the links (sorry).
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notes from Marshall Poe talk at Eastern Michigan University.
On the screen: "Sigismund von Herberstein".
intro: "informed about wikipedia, active participants in the creation of knowledge through wikipedia"
sponsors: history, philosophy
full house, or at least mostly full.
no t-mobile signal, and no open wifi; and therefore no way to ask twitter for a password for the emich wifi. and no power at the desk. so there might be limits to what I can do online, and I do have paper as a backup.
second speaker introduces marshall poe. "marshall poe is no charlatan". phd from u cal berkeley. taught at harvard, nyu, now at iowa. field is russian history, became aware of his work. many teaching awards including at harvard. many publications. numerous. various. books, articles, reviews, "the russian moment in world history" princeton university press. book sold well, translated to swedish, greek, russian. forthcoming. scholarly, very scholarly. vast number of reviews. publishing online "later then published by large publishers". book forthcoming called "wiki world: the globalization of knowledge in the 21st century" based on atlantic monthly.
suggested that grad students read and bring up to academic standards the set of russian history articles. "wikipedia is junk", "don't want to encourage it any more". contributor to using the internet for scholarly purposes. (hm, have any of his articles been done for assistive media? check on this). memory archive, have people write down their own memories. former moderator of the early slavic studies list. cofounder of new journals dealing with russian history. scholar, teacher, leading thinker. ability to communicate effectively scholarly insights to the general public.
(applause) (applause)
"sigismund freiherr von herberstein". "the columbus of russia". for my sins I spent my youth studying this individual. surfing the net, found wiki. who else is interested? Phaedrus86. Doesn't saw a lot about himself. Computer programmer in New Zealand...who else is interested? "I was just kind of interested." History degree, read his books. Send him Christmas cards. Revelation in 2001, found a person who was not a professional who was also interested.
A lot of people know a lot of stuff, and not recorded, and when you die it will die with you. Wikipedia is a way for you to say what you know. Knowledge is not something you can take with you. You can contribute, collaborate with millions of other people in building the greatest repository of knowledge the world has ever known.
History of wikipedia
What it is, how it works
How to use it for your own purposes
1. Nupedia. 1998 start, 2000 copy on archive.org. Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger.2000/04/07. Academics work really slowly. Didn't work.
2. Sanger meets a wiki person (who?). Wiki, collaboratively. Great idea. Implemented it on Nupedia, nothing happened. Academics said "you've got to be kidding". Mass defection, pissed off all the academics. Project is at an end.
3. Sanger. Let's just let anybody edit it. Wales: Ana Kournikova web ring, big in 2000.
Discovered quite by accident that there was a lot of people who were aching to edit encyclopedia articles.
Professors said "this is going to be crap". Maybe they're right, but they're not, they're not right.
Wikipedia 2001/03/31: Not terribly flashy, bad logo "accident with Illustrator".
Now: enormous: 2m+ English, 256k+ Svenska.
Everyone is dumping everything they know into it.
Wikipedians.... "there's a whole group of people who don't do anything except fix commas".
Alexa 9% of the net: 240m people use Wikipedia on any given day.
"What is this thing, facebook of which you speak? In my day it was called Friendster."
who is bigger than wikipedia? youtube, google, but not facebook or myspace.
edit, revert, edit, revert, add, add, cite.
Beyond Talmudic, beyond Byzantine - they go on and on and on about these things.
What is on Wikipedia *should be* correct, because it's the public.
"The legendary water tower".
Every meaningful object of experience has a page on wikipedia.
"History of the heavy metal umlaut."
Wikipedia in academia:
Wikipedia is a conversation, not an entity.
Take a dog to the beach. "Too useful to go away".
"There's some crazy dude in New Zealand who's going to do that for you."
How should you use wikipedia? Very carefully.
"For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia."
What do you do:
1. Register. Why would you want to be anonymous on the web? So you can hide. Because you hide if you're doing bad stuff.
(note to self: register on arborwiki, register on wikipedia, register on great lakes wiki....)
2. Build a reputation. Simple: act well, other people notice that you act well. similar to ebay. "reputation management system".
3. Formal mechanisms to engage wikipedia. Use wikipedia as a course assignment.
(mapoe, that's a cereal I used to eat when I was a kid)
Using the wiki as course management software - Marshall Poe at Iowa - let John Lawler talk to him about this !)
* don't plagiarize
* cite your sources
* don't make stuff up
H-RUSSIA
WikiProject Russian history
"Go there and add and contribute".
"Make sure everyone knows everything."
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It was a great talk, and it was good talking with him afterwards. I gave him an a2b3 sticker, so if you're in Iowa and you see one of those say hi.
