Awareness as it Relates to Wikipedia Essay -- Wikipedia

In the paper â€Å"Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces† written by Paul Dourish and Victoria Bellotti, the authors describe awareness as: â€Å"an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity† (Dourish 107). This concept appears several times in the various Wikipedia research papers. We can also see that as Wikipedia changes and evolves one of the key aspects of successful awareness, passive awareness rather than active awareness, is potentially being eroded. Finally, the definition of awareness as described by Dourish and Bellotti was written almost 20 years ago and certainly was not considering a collaborative effort such as Wikipedia, there are considerations and alterations should be taken into consideration when looking at awareness in an environment such as Wikipedia. The article â€Å"Lifting the Veil: Improving Accountability and social Transparency in Wikipedia with WikiDashboard† discusses the issue Wikipedia faces with quality and accountability while proposing a potential solution. The main focus of the article is the WikiDashboard application that the authors created, however the reason this application is created is to address the transparency issue with Wikipedia. â€Å"Despite their tremendous success, collaborative models of knowledge building are still viewed with skepticism. The quality, accountability, and trustworthyness of the articles in Wikipedia has been debated heavily in the press† (Bongwon 1037). This distrust is the result of the disconnect of awareness between the Wikipedia readers and the Wikipedia writers, who of course can be the same individuals but in many cases are not. When a reader of a Wikipedia article cannot say for sure who has wr... ...Lifting the veil: improving accountability and social transparency in Wikipedia with wikidashboard Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems 1037-1040. Bryant, Forte and Bruckman (2005) Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of Participation in a Collaborative Online Encyclopedia Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work (GROUP'05) 1-10. Kittur, Suh, Pendleton and Chi (2007) He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI'07) 453-462. Butler, Joyce and Pike (2008) Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy: the nature and roles of policies and rules in wikipedia Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI'08) 1101-1110.