Jimmy Wales visit to my virtual communities seminar

Jimmy Wales visited my class this morning. I learned a lot about the way conflict has been managed on the U.S. version of Wikipedia. One topic of discussion was how the communities of different language versions have developed different methods for mediating conflict. It makes sense, but I hadn’t thought of that. Jimmy admitted to having little direct knowledge of how some languages are managing these issues because he can’t read many of them himself. This is good news when considering the sustainability of the project once he leaves. It was very interesting to hear his thoughts on issues of control and how the Wiki model is very different in this respect from many other models for social software. I definitely need to do some more research into the theory underlying the Wiki model. One funny thing I found out about was the Guerilla UK spelling campaign. Fortunately, I just discovered that their is a counter campaign. Had I known sooner that my nation’s honor (not honour) was at stake, I might have become a more active user!