Icelandic edublog
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Ever since I began to participate in wikimedia projects and call myself Wikipedian I have felt Wikipedia is a social movement. Contributing in Wikipedia articles is a statemant that you have faith in this kind of cooperative work and most wikipedians share the vision that there should be no or as small as possible barrier to information and how you can use information - it is a kind of open source spirit.
Maybe Wikipedia is not a social movement, maybe it is not even a social network. When does a social network became a social movement?
In this blog by Storygeek Is Wikipedia A Social Network he discusses how well Wikipedia fits the definition of social network.
One of the criteria for social network he says is making profiles and making friends/contacts. There is a system to add friends/contacts in Wikipedia etc. by assigning youself to a group …. one popular way of doing this is by using userboxes such as at my user page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Salvorand even if not all people that write in wikipedia create profiles (almost none of my students do) then it is easy to look up the edits made by one user - so your cronolodgical list of edits makes up your profile even if you have not created one. You are ranked higher by other Wikipedians if you have many edits and you have written many articles.New users on Wikipedia have very little info on their user pages because wikipedia user pages tend to be about what you have done on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a social network.
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