Conference Report Session IV: (Re)presentation of Knowledge
Posted: September 26, 2010 at 8:47 pm | By: Tobias Prüwer | Tags: Gabriele Blome, Rainer Hammwöhner, Ulrich Johannes Schneider, Wikipedia
Rainer Hammwöhner: Aspects of global Wikipedia und Wikimedia commons
The orator takes some raw data of Wikipedia authors’ mother tongues – as has been claimed by them – to talk about the differences between Wikipedia in different languages. He uses the example of the entries “Sachsen”/”Saxony” in the German and English Wikipedia to show how diverse the categorizations might be: In the English version, the German federal state is strongly linked with the (early) medieval Saxon people, which is not the case in the German Wikipedia. Having given such an illustrative picture of Wikipedia differences, the orator asks, if the English Wikipedia functions as something like a global blackboard. He suggests that this must be denied – his random sample cannot proof it. Read the rest of this entry »