BO1 : boud

Title: (The role of pos/neg feedback and NPOV on meme evolution in the wikisphere) (ID BO1)

  • Language: English | License:
  • Room size: medium/large
  • Category: WIKI SOCIOLOGY
  • type: Lecture
  • Budget requirements: {{{budgetrequire}}}
  • Budget priority: {{{budget}}}

Author[s]: boud.

  • Contact: [OTRS]
  • Contacted by:
  • (From: | available days: ?)
Abstract

The wikisphere (wikis, especially the wikimedia wikis) demonstrates a method of reorganising information that is very different both from state controlled media and from corporate media. In all models of information reorganisation, the massive amount of information potentially obtainable from over six billion people needs to be condensed by factors of a thousand, a million or even a billion if the aim is to give everybody a chance to contribute to knowledge. This high factor of information compression necessarily implies a very high risk of censorship - removing or hiding w:memes against the interests of the w:government or the w:market economy. Does the wikisphere enable undesirable (for the government or for the economy), but correct, w:memes to survive, and possibly even to become widely distributed? Can this be quantified? Three of the most obvious factors in the wikisphere which distinguish it from government and corporate media are very short time-scale positive and w:negative feedbacks (adding and removing information) and the neutral point of view (w:NPOV) principle which, in principle, enables the survival of memes which could otherwise be censored. The aim of this project is to understand something about meme evolution in the wikisphere by quantitatively measuring the roles of some of the positive and negative feedbacks and the NPOV, using the data present in the wikimedia databases. A brief introduction to the concepts and quantitative results will be presented. The software to carry out the full analysis will be available as a w:GPL package.

Other thoughts: details (from userpage draft)

About the author[s]:


Status information in the templates is not up to date. Please see Internal:Speakers/Categories for final status information.


  • accept: AB, PD (maybe with longer discussion after the presentation), JV
  • reject:
  • status:

Interesting; good for community-discussion? Sj