Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource
The author of this paper defines Wikipedia as: an Internet-based, user contributed encyclopedia that is collaboratively edited, and utilizes the wiki concept. The fact that everybody can change any page within the Web site, brings a lot of uncertainty about the reliability of the articles. This is the reason why the author of this paper is looking for a reliable set of metrics for evaluating the quality of Wikipedias articles.
He uses the free information Wikipedia offers about the number of edits and the number of different editors of each article. Then he compares all articles on one subject, with a reference encyclopedia to determine the quality. He also investigates the quality of articles before and after they were cited in the media.
Based on statistic results, the author concludes that articles, often edited by a lot of editors, are qualitative superior to those with less editors. Next to that, he ascertains that the quality of articles improves after they were cited in media.
Toshoni Van Craen
Andrew Lih, 2004, Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource,5th International Symposium on Online Journalism, 31 http://jmsc.hku.hk/faculty/alih/publications/utaustin-2004-wikipedia-rc2.pdf
Social Capital and the Networked Public Sphere: Implications for Political Social Media sites
The author of this paper investigates the importance of creating online public spheres to renew democracy. Next to that, he wants to clarify the value of using the public sphere concept in eParticipation studies. In order to do so, he reviews literature on the public sphere, he explains the concepts of the network society and the networked public sphere, and he presents social capital as a possible explanation for why people participate.
In an example case study of a Norwegian political partys online community web site, he tries to compare his results of reviewing literature with reality. The case study examines the actions on the political partys web site. Because of the specific structure of the web site (three separated discussion zones), relations between the different zone and relations between users became clear.
The author concludes that there is a great deal of disagreement on how the concept of the public sphere is defined. Yet he did identify six requirements that need to be present in a public sphere: Autonomy, critique, reflectivity, perspective, sincerity and equality. Because of the disagreement on the concept, he thinks that eParticipation studies using the public sphere should acknowledge these disagreements.
The example case study shows that participants of public spheres have increasing levels of social capital, making social capital both a requirement and an outcome of a working public sphere. However, the author does not give a final statement whether these online public spheres are or are not important to renew democracy.
Toshoni Van Craen
Marius Rohde Johannessen, 2007, Social Capital and the Networked Public Sphere: Implications for Political Social media sites, 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 9, 2573-2582 http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/HICSS.2012.535
