On the word "wiki" - and its real application

The just published issue of First Monday has an interesting paper, which employs the word "wiki" but in fact goes beyond what is usually meant by it, applying it to the studies of identities. I find the paper interesting, but the usage of the word wiki in this context, even more so. Behold the evolving language - or at least, academia's love for coining neologisms :)

Read the paper here: Wikidentities: Young people collaborating on virtual identities in social network sites by Kerry Mallan, Natasha Giardina

Another thought: the paper misspells the "Condorcet's jury theorem" writing instead about the "Concordet Jury Theorem" (Condorcet comes from theorem's inventor, Marquis de Condorcet). If First Monday articles were a wiki, this could be easily corrected. As it is... the paper, pretty modern as far as academia goes, does not even allow easy commenting on its contents. I wonder when this will change?

The joy of ignorance

Or why do I love Wikimedia Commons (the Wikipedia-style media repository). It's not only because I can upload my high resolution, sometimes a bit crappy images :) It's not only because the images can be displayed on Wikipedia. It's because they will be near perfectly categorized - time, place, type... and if I don't know how to categorize them - I can just wait and see how somebody will categorize in in the future. Now, I know little about life sciences: animals, plants, etc. But I still take photos of them... and what happens?

I upload a picture that in my vast knowledge I name "Black bird on grass" :) and categorize it in "unidentified birds". A month later, somebody else updates it to "Unidentified Passeriformes". Few months later, we have the bird narrowed down to "Turdus merula".

Watching this happen to all of my images, from mushrooms to strange parts of machinery, is really fun :)

Feeling like testing your visual knowledge? Try the "Category:Unidentified subject". I think I see a camel...

PS. In other news: my Wikipedia adventures were blogged about by Durova.