Research Methods and Wikipedia

I'm fully aware of the extent to which I'm showing my geekiness here, but lately I've been noticing that Wikipedia doesn't have many entries on qualitative research methods. If I were teaching a graduate course in research methods, I'd assign 1000-2000 word articles on the following topics -- and more as I think of them -- to be written for submission to Wikipedia (this assignment could be collaborative):

For the past few weeks, I've been following Clay's book reviews with interest, as he's rereading texts on methods in preparation for his Spring 2005 research methods class. I hope he'll consider having his students write articles for Wikipedia. Besides being helpful for the students, it would put information and knowledge into the commons and benefit others.

Edited to link to Clay's course description and to add that Wikipedia does have decent entries on case study and ethnography.

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CROSSBOW

Hi, are you familiar with CROSSBOW, a project to limit bias in "story selection" on Wikipedia. There's also a post on it here.

That's an interesting idea about class assignments. I do media studies, so I won't have the chance for this project, but I thought it would be cool if people who taught technical writing would assign their students to document under-documented open-source projects. They could start with Feed On Feeds. :)

Oh, and don't get me started on the Wikipedia entries for "Media Studies" and "Communications."
infobong.com

oops

that up there is Chris, too braindead to remember to sign her name, apparently. :o

Totally irrelevant, but I fir

Totally irrelevant, but I first saw "Ethnomethodology" and thought "Ethnodemonology? What?", which is a sign that I really need to stop watching Angel reruns.

I hope you had a good day yesterday--I was thinking of you and sending good wishes and I almost called... stupid anxiety and stuff got the better of me. I'd still like to do something for you, sometime.

And you know how fabulous geekiness is! :)

CROSSBOW, OSDDP, and contributing to existing wikis

Thanks for letting me know about CROSSBOW, Chris. Stuff like this doesn't surprise me at all:

Examples of systemic bias:

  • Because so many Wikipedians do their research on line, topics not already well covered on the Internet tend to be
    under-covered in Wikipedia.
  • Because so many English-language Wikipedians live in a very small number of countries, topics pertaining strongly to those
    countries are disproportionately covered.
  • Because so many Wikipedians are interested in technology,
    technological topics are disproportionately well covered. Ditto
    science fiction. Ditto libertarianism. Conversely, and presumably for
    parallel reasons, there is very little on (as Xed points
    out) contemporary events in Africa or (as I'd point out) even on
    African-American history or Native American history: most of our
    articles on Native Americans are written from an anthropologist's point
    of view, whereas our articles on (for example) punk rock
    or grunge rock or the science fiction fandom are consistently written
    with insider's knowledge.

There are also many articles that could be added to the RhetTechWiki, and again, if I were teaching a rhetoric of technology class, this would be on the syllabus, which brings up an issue I've been thinking about for a little while now: I'd argue that it's preferable to contribute to existing wikis than to start new ones. Based on my experience, I suspect that it might be a common impulse to create a wiki from scratch, perhaps in order to be able to say, "This is our university's wiki." I could be wrong, of course, but whenever I've participated in teaching-with-technology workshops, I've heard this sentiment over and over again...but maybe it doesn't occur to people to contribute to existing wikis. Anyone have other thoughts on this?

Also, Chris, you said, "I thought it would be cool if people who taught technical writing would assign their students to document under-documented open-source projects." I don't know if you're familiar with Purdue's Open Source Development and Documentation Project, but if not, check it out; they're doing some pretty neat stuff.

More on geekiness

I kinda like this t-shirt. How geeky is that?

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