Oh, I've been holding this one inside for too long.
This is just the greatest headliner fark could produce:
Wikipedia hits 10,000,000 articles. [citation needed]
I recently took a contract that had me do about 100 citations on wikipedia. I wrote the contract to specifically produce a document that was permanent, as a record of all the sites I changed; I know the nature of wikipedia - things are really transient and there is no guarantee that anything I post will stick. To put it lightly, things didn't stick. By the time I produced changes to the 100th article, posting citations of real, print publications that were pertinent and many were written by the person upon whom the article centered, I had two nasty facebook "editors" after me, judging that I had been promoting media and that was not kosher on Wikipedia. But when I asked why IMDB links were allowed to stay on and how my citations were any less pro(print materials with a plethora of information anyone interested in these articles would definitely consider reading). The short version goes like this: Amazon.com is one of the most substantial ($$$,$$$,$$$+) donors to Wikipedia.org. This would seem harmless... but the fact is, Amazon.com bought IMDB in 1998. And they claim they're an unbiased, "free community only allowing for objective, academic content." My foot!
Well, Wikipedia, you Wile E. Coyote, I'm now forever scarred.
As an adjunct professor, I allow my students to look up their topics on Wikipedia, but I insist that because it is not a publication and can be so easily manipulated, they may not use Wikipedia articles as a source. (The only exception I've ever made to this was when a student did her research paper on Facebook. Can someone suggest any print materials about the Facebook movement by the way?) But unless you can somehow provide a way to post up citations (real, print sources) without being labeled an "advertiser" on a site where the biggest advertisement of all (IMDB) is magically "above" this judgment...
That was just fun. I'm glad I had the chance to get it out. :) Ciao.
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Maybe not any books yet but a lot of attention being paid to social networking sites like Facebook in the academic world. Try here to get started.
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