engleski

Wikipedia as a research opportunity and a rising research field

As one of the top ten sites on the web, and with enormous amounts of transparent and accessible data in many different languages, Wikipedia has attracted a substantial amount of multidisciplinary academic interest in disciplines ranging from physics, computer science, sociology, linguistics, library and information sciences to cultural studies. This wide-ranging interest creates a dynamic field in which it is possible to discern different methods and approaches, which are sometimes tackling similar issues and research questions, and coming up with different results. Even the definition of Wikipedia poses a challenge and opens up discussions about its nature. Can it be compared to print encyclopaedias? What is the difference between print and digital encyclopaedias? What is the role of an encyclopaedia in general? Should encyclopaedias cover current events? The hybrid field of Wikipedia research, which some would call a „messy shape of knowledge“ or perhaps even part of worldwide „e-research“, provides many opportunities and challenges for creating appropriate research designs. It is the aim of this presentation is to offer an overview of current and ongoing research and analyses of Wikipedia. It will provide some basic facts and statistics about Wikipedia, present relevant literature as well as various digital tools that aid in analyzing Wikipedia, all in order to provide a clear picture of Wikipedia itself and various research projects rising around it. For that purpose the presentation will introduce a proposal for the classification of approaches from a social science and humanities perspective. These can be broadly divided into two categories: research that evaluates Wikipedia in comparison to print encyclopaedias, and research that focuses on the specificities of a digital encyclopaedia. Coming from a background in sociology and history my approach for studying Wikipedia is twofold: first, studying it as part of a broader social and historical state of the network society, the networked communication model and web 2.0 ; and second, studying the community of editors and the content creation process on the MediaWiki software. Focusing on editing activities of current events on Wikipedia as part of my doctoral research, the presentation will close with an argument on the relevance of Wikipedia in the contemporary media ecology and information environment.

Wikipedia; multidisciplinarity; research designs

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