Wikipedia
Related: disambiguation - encyclopedia - popular culture
Branding Wikipedia as a Popular Culture Encyclopedia would be doing it a grave injustice, but a 2004 article emphasized just that:
"The Wikipedia, written by amateur editors on a volunteer basis, has grown to include an enormous amount of specific information about contemporary popular culture, with articles on individual works of popular culture, their creators, their technology, and their fictional characters. It illustrates that the participants in a popular culture (a characterization that would include essentially all citizens of developed nations, and all Wikipedia editors) mentally retain a huge store of facts and aesthetic judgments about the popular culture to which they have been exposed. It also illustrates a particular value of the Wikipedia, since conventional encyclopedias generally do not contain this sort of information, despite its clear relevance to understanding the contemporary state of humankind."
And in 2005 somebody commented that Wikipedia was similar to a simulacrum
"The online encyclopedia Wikipedia itself may be seen as a large-scale field experiment in the spread of simulacra. It is notable that many pages contain factoids about the meaning of words in the fictitious context of popular movies, video and role-playing games, usually derivative cliches in imitation of other such fictions. For instance the 1999 movie The Matrix explores the relationship between people and their simulacra; and in a further example of self-reference Neo, one of the lead characters from the movie, uses a hollowed out copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation as a secret store."
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Profile
Wikipedia is a Web-based, multi-language, free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers and sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It has editions in about 180 languages (about 100 of which are active) and contains entries on traditional encyclopedic topics and on almanac, gazetteer, and current events topics. Its purpose is to create and distribute a free, reliable encyclopedia in as many languages as possible —indeed, the largest encyclopedia in history, in terms of both breadth and depth. According to Hitwise, an online measurement company, Wikipedia is the most popular reference site on the web. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikipediaCriticism [...]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia/Our_Replies_to_Our_CriticsPopular culture and the Wikipedia
Wikipedia as similacrum
See also: self-referentiality - similacrum
Wikipedia will fork
Wikipedia will fork - that is, a group of academics will take Wikipedia's content, which is available under a free license, and produce their own peer-reviewed reference work. "I wanted to send a wake-up call to the Wikipedia community to tell them that this fork is probably going to happen."
[Wikipedia's first problem] is that "regardless of whether Wikipedia actually is more or less reliable than the average encyclopedia," librarians, teachers, and academics don't perceive it as credible, because it has no formal review process.
The second problem, according to Sanger, is that the site in general and Wales in particular are too "anti-elitist." Established scholars might be willing to contribute to Wikipedia - but not if they have to deal with trolls and especially not if they're considered no different from any schmo with an iMac. Larry Sanger, 2005, via http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki_pr.html
Wikipedia:What links here
The what links here facility [on Wikipedia] can be used to see which other articles contain links to one you are interested in. To see this information, choose the what links here link while looking at any page.
The list of links to an article is useful in a number of ways:
- It gives a very rough indication of how popular a page is. Pages with many links are likely to be viewed often and should therefore be of the very best quality. Pages with few or no links may not be very popular.
- Where the subject material of an article is unclear, the list of articles linking to it might provide useful context. For instance when presented with a stub about John Smith that gives only his date of birth and death, the viewing the list of links to the article might reveal that he won a gold medal in the Olympics.
This facility works also for a page that does not exist (there may be links to it, which makes it extra useful to create it). -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_links_here [Feb 2005]
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