Today, we discussed wikis and knowledge sharing, and more specifically, Wikipedia. The class discussed just what it was that made contributing to Wikipedia, or any online forum worthwhile. There is no money involved, there is little or no prestige involved, and yet people spend hours, days, and months of their lives adding and subtracting facts, fixing punctuation, and removing vandalism to any number of posts.
As the discussion leader for the day, I was clicking around on Wikipedia and we decided to check out the Pop-tarts page that was mentioned in the article we were reading. The page has over 1000 edits, the most recent change taking place just two days ago. We checked out recent change by a user who calls himself "Bongwarrior." He decided to include the fact that microwaving a pop-tart can actually turn the middle into an amorphous solid. While we had a good laugh about his screenname, I wondered what motivated him to write such a thing. I figured he was just high and he thought it would be funny.
A bit of resarch (Wikipedia makes this very easy) showed me that Bongwarrior is not a a stoner bonehead vandalizing posts under the influence of medicinal canabis, but actually quite the opposite. In the last week alone, he's made more than 500 edits, mostly patrolling recent posts for vandalism and reverting to the most recent acceptable versions.
According to his user profile page, he enjoys heavy metal music, supports the legalization of canabis, likes Stephen King, plays acoustic guitar, and claims to know pi to two decimal places. Sounds like quite a scholar!
Not surprisingly, however, the only posts he's actually made recent text edits to (as opposed to reverting to non-vandalized versions), are about Stephen King and Megadeth. By recently, of course, I mean in the last two days. On May 14th alone, he made a total of nearly 50 adjustments.
What does he get out of this? What does anybody get out of this? Sure, a sense of sharing knowledge, a chance to be "right," and the feeling of some sort of community, I guess. There must be more to it though, because people obviously get hooked and go at this thing with great fervour. And what does it say that of the 500 edits he's made in the last week, 3 of them were actually his contributions to a post. The rest were fighting vandalism. Has Wikipedia jumped the shark? Or will this army of moderators keep up with vandals?
At some point, something's gotta give. And when it does, Bongwarrior will either be a hero in the annals of Wikihistory, or he'll be forgotten like that guy who did that thing...
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1 comment:
many of you may have voted for obama and that is just fine. but what bothers me is the fact that the people who ridiculed george bush are now that same people that censor others. on wikipedia if you mention any connection between obama and ayers your account will be closed from the amount of people calling you a vandal.
You can't just say that hitler never did anything wrong no matter how much one may regret it. Bongwarrior blocked my account for vandalism. He makes me ill. Wikipedia= anyone can edit it...unless you disagree with mainstream media.
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