Online chat on Wikipedia in the Academy

This was behind a pay-wall before now, but the Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article on the relationship between Wikipedia and academia. I was quoted in there, and it focusses a little on the Isuzu Experiment but I guess that’s not all bad. As always, I think that there is space there for missed nuance (the nature of a short article), and I feel like I should hedge some of the things there. For example, although I do mostly make changes anonymously, in part because I am a known wikispammer and I don’t want the name to influence people’s perception of the edit. However, in the case of the Com Theory article, I did do it as myself. It doesn’t show up in the history because the article was moved (from “Theories of Communication”). And I know that traditional institutional scholars do contribute to Wikipedia, and that contribution is often valued.

But, please do challenge the things I said there and elsewhere. I’ll be part of a an online discussion run by The Chronicle titled Wikipedia: Beat It, Join It, or Ignore It? this Thursday, October 26, at 3pm EST (19:00 GMT). Hope you can join in.