Upon reading the title of this blog, you would more or less say to yourself that the reason that Wikipedia.org, the user-based encyclopedia application, is so successful is because you could just do the “copy-paste” syndrome to your research papers. However, that’s not the reason Wikipedia became successful. It wasn’t because people kept on visiting it for information. It was because people gave their time and resources into making the application whole. The article that was written by Mr Fernanda B. Viegas – namely ”The Visual Side of Wikipedia” details some of the reasons why Wikipedia has become one of the most successful user-oriented and managed sites on the Internet today.
The article dabbles on the visual side of Wikipedia, hence the title of the article. Aside from the multitudes of articles that users constantly update every second of the day, there also exist images that pertain to particular portions of the article. They are the main heroes of this story. Wikipedia gives people the chance to contribute images to any article on the site. That’s not all however. People are dedicated to this cause, it gives them a chance to spread their knowledge through the pictures that they contribute to the application. This is much like the articles of the application. The site grew since people, us ordinary users, contributed in our own little way to make the application more complete. I mean, people even design and edit pictures to make them more presentable on the application. Talk about dedication.
Wikipedia attracts all sorts of people because of the broad range of things that are posted on the application. Whether they are articles about scientific discoveries, unsolved mysteries, popular media or even simple housekeeping - people still continue to manage the application as a whole and contribute whatever knowledge they have to the world through the application. Academicians and other scholarly constantly make use of Wikipedia and contribute to it to impart their own knowledge and acquire new knowledge of their own. In the same way, they study articles on the application in order to determine its credibility. In most cases, pertinent information on the site coincides with tradtional scholarly writing. Though, this isn’t the case most of the time – it’s no wonder people still continue making use of the application for their researches and casual reading, thus attracting more “Wikipedians” who would also in some way contribute to the application’s growth. Now, let’s talk about pictures in Wikipedia.
As indicated in the article, “Wiki technology was designed for manipulating text, not images.” True enough the highlights of the application are the text. Images are separate files which would have to be imported by external means, language dependent, and may be subject to copyright. Aside from that, images also suffer from the technical deficiencies such as having necessary equipment to edit images, etc. So by looking at all of these possible negatives, can images instill a sense of collaboration or cooperation amongst contributors?
Due to a survey conducted by the author of the article, they were able to find out various reasons why people would still opt to post images, orginal or not, to Wikipedia’s articles. The survey consisted of different people throughout the world. A majority of these people contributed a hefty number of pictures to the application. The pictures all varied from original pictures to scanned pictures. Many of them were taken using digital cameras and edited with various photo editing tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
What motivated them to post pictures? The respondents all had varying motives on uploading the images, however they had several similar ideas which should be noted. One, they felt that articles would’ve been better off with an accompanying images. Here we can already see a form of user collaboration. One or more makes the article, and one or more helps make the article better by adding images. This can also be seen through another motive which is to improve images already uploaded. With the varying thoughts of people, their sense of “good” and “bad” are very different and this is no exception. Nevertheless, Wikipedia’s articles are the ones who benefit from this opposition the most. The next motivation oversees Wikipedia’s success story, because people want to make contribution that would last for a long time. Lastly, for love of photography.
Now to answer the question I posted in paragraph 4 (no counting now..) do all the respondents feel a sense of collaboration among their Wiki-peers through the images posted? In order to answer that the author threw a monkey wrench at them in several questions the first, and the only one that I will discuss, is if the already available images in the application inspired them to upload their own images. 86% of the respondents answered yes, so what exactly drove them to do so? First off, many pictures were a source of inspiration to them. Second, it gave them a chance to improve upon ugly photos or on the article itself by adding better pictures. Third, to set the bar on improvement. Fourth, to cover grounds in the articles which were still not touched on by others through their images. Fifth, for learning purposes and lastly to compete with others’ images. It is interesting to note that people’s identities play a big role in uploading images. They are constantly driven by something which doesn’t necessarily work towards the improvement of the application but rather themselves. The fact that the application benefits from these is no wonder though. I could tackle the reasons of the respondents on asking others to upload photos and why most would rather seek external help in technical matters, but I know that you are already bored so I’ll try to wrap up my blog entry soon. However, if you are wondering 96% opted to tell others to contribute and 92% sought outside help.
The community of image contributors has certainly grown because of many underlying reasons. All of these reasons have become individual puzzle pieces to the question on why Wikipedia has become one of the best user-collaboration applications on the Net today. As I said earlier, image gathering is tedious and hard. You would need to meet with people in real life in order to acquire a number of them – that is already forming a certain degree of collaboration that can be extended in Wikipedia. And as I finally end this article, I would like to say that user collaboration in sites help in the development of the application. “Man is not an island” to quote the classic saying, and this proves it.
To see the full article go to: http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/papers/viegas_hicss_visual_wikipedia.pdf
Tags: Study, User Collaboration, Wikipedia
