Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

Please note that all live notes are taken by attendees, and are permanently editable by all blog group members. In note-taking by multiple parties during a running event mistakes of both content and attribution are highly likely. Live Notes are not a reliable source of quotable material; all notes are (sometimes significant) on-the-fly paraphrases by the various note-takers. When possible we attempt to return to the live notes and edit them to greater accuracy, but this is not a guarantee.

Meeting notes are a best effort – comment with or blog your corrections.

Attendees:

• AS: Alex Schenk
• CT: Carl Tashian
• RF: Randy Fenstermacher
• Apple: Kyle
• AR: Arnold Reinhold
• JB: Jonah Boswitch
• I: Improv
• j

• Introductions
• Wikimania on the brain still
  • Anyone from Wikimania who’s in town with nothing better to do should come meet some bloggers.
    

    I asked about citations in articles, which is something many of you are concerned about. They’re beginning to allow and encourage them. One of the men here is responsible for selecting featured articles. He says he tries not to include articles with no sources.

    We talked a bit about the anonymity of Wikipedia authors. One participant gave the example of an author of a book about weapons who won an esteemed prize for his work, which later evidence showed he fabricated. Because his name is publicly attached to that book, people know he was the one responsible for the book. Because his name is known, he won’t be able to get certain jobs in academia because of what happened and because he’s now known for fabricating scholarship. How does anonymous writing in Wikipedia relate to this story?

    We also talked about the “It’s a wiki. Fix it yourself.” issue. If people are unhappy or unsatisfied with something, they often don’t take the initiative to change or improve the article.

  • Maybe some Hacking Days participants can tell us what life’s about.
  • Find out how you can participate!
  • Hacking Days
  • Citizen journanlism day
• Anyone from BlogHer want to tell us how it was?
• BarCamp Earth
• RedLine for a special party from 9 to 11 pm