Europe According to English Wikipedia: Open-sourcing the Discourse on Europe (I)
Europe According to English Wikipedia: Open-sourcing the Discourse on Europe (I)

Summary/Abstract: With the rise of Wikipedia, knowledge production has become unprecedentedly collaborative. In some cases, thousands of participants from various countries and different educational and cultural backgrounds work together to create a single Wikipedia entry. Additionally, this free encyclopaedia is being increasingly used as a substitute for more traditional encyclopaedias and other academic sources in everyday lives of ordinary people, and has come into a position to affect views and opinions of many individuals. This has led some authors to argue that, because of Wikipedia, knowledge is simply becoming an aggregation of public opinion. This research will scrutinise these claims by examining Wikipedia's history, background and modus operandi, while setting out a Foucaldian methodology for studying a single entry in this encyclopaedia. The second part of the research (published in the same issue of the CASCA Journal) will test this methodology by examining the entry on Europe in English Wikipedia.

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