UCISA WLF / UKOLN Workshop: Beyond Email - Annotations Of The First Talk

You can use this page to annotate the talk on "New Devices and New Technologies" to be given by Brian Kelly on 22 Nov 2004.

RSS is great. It is already increasingly being integrated into browsers and desktops and there are some good clients around (Feed Demon, NetNewsWire etc.). I use the web-based client Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com. It allows you to set up RSS feeds for mailing lists too so those mailing lists you use primarily for information rather than discussion can be read as news rather than mail. Alison Pope (UCISA)

I agree that RSS is great - but there are problems: RSS vs ATOM - we still haven't got a stable standard RSS and advertising - although there is no spam, there are adverts creeping into feeds (e.g. Engadget)

I've recently seen a lecturer warn students off using wikipedia as a source of information. I think this is a shame - but will some high profile wikis give the concept a bad name?

Hi Owen! Agreed. As long as publishing software and rss clients support all available standards it is easy to forget there are competing standards but this may become more problematic. Advertising and spam in comments may become increasingly annoying and harder to filter than in e-mail? Alison Pope (UCISA)

Did you see this article (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1302435,00.html) in the Observer comparing wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica - "self-healing" knowledge over "official" knowledge. Alison Pope (UCISA)

A cynic might argue that comparing Wikipedia as a source of knowledge is a good lesson in diagnosing bias and checking validity. Wikipedia is susceptible to vandalism and internal politics, but so are other sources - see http://www.physics.hku.hk/~tboyce/ss/topics/postsokal.html or http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html

I hadn't seen that article, but isn't it slightly naive? If I want to assess the quality of an entry in the EB, I just need to find the author, and decide what I think their authority is. However, if want to do the same in wikipedia, how do I do it?

This paper (from the 5th international symposium on online journalism, 2004) on the topic of assessing Wikipedia is interesting: http://journalism.utexas.edu/onlinejournalism/wikipedia.pdf On a more general level, I would begin by checking the facts in a Wikipedia article, checking citations/sources (if stated) - one should apply the same to the EB!