Reading Assignment #3 Notes

Extracted notes from readings #3:

Know it all: Can wikipedia conquer expertise?
Stacy Schiff

-Wikipedia was launched in 2001. The number of visitors has been doubling every four months, and the site receives as many as fourteen thousand hits per second. Wikipedia functions as a fulter for vast amounts of information online. There are no physical limits on its size, Wikipedia can aspire to be all-inclusive.
- Anyone with Internet access can create a Wikipedia entry or edit one. The site has hundreds of thousands of contributors.

-The encyclopedic impulse first dated back in 220 A.D. by a Chinese emperor, for use by civil servants. The quest to catalogue all human knowledge accelerated in eighteenth century.

-Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, believes that the promise of the Internet is free knowledge for everyone.
As an undergraduate, he head read Friedrich Hayeck's 1945 free market manifesto, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," which argues that a person's knowledge is by definition partial, and that truth is established only when people pool their wisdom.

The articles must reflect a neutral point of view, and their content must be both verifiable and previously published.

What Wikipedia lacks: clarity and concision; the facts maybe sturdy, but the connective tissue is either anemic or absent; and citation is hit or miss.

Wikipedia is a combination of manifesto and reference work. Peer review, the mainstream media, and government agencies have landed us in a ditch. Not only are we impatient with the authorities but we are in a mood to talk back. Wikipedia offers endless opportunities for self-expression.

The New Yorker:
The News Business Out of Print
The Death and life of the American newspaper.
By Eric Alterman

Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago.

The rise of the internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive.
-people no longer believed in the printed press.

No longer would people accept “a godlike figure from above” presenting the news as
“gospel.” Today’s consumers “want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point of view about not just what
happened but why it happened. . . . And finally, they want to be able to use the information in a larger community—to talk
about, to debate, to question, and even to meet people who think about the world in similar or different ways.”



THE REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
(extracted from Judith Bell, Doing your Research Project: A guide for first-time researchers in
education, health and social science, 4th ed, Open University Press, London, 2005)

‘Theory’ has been explained as being ‘a set of interrelated abstract propositions about human
affairs and the social world that explain their regularities and relationships’ (Brewer 2000: 192), as
‘a proposition about the relationship between things’ (Denscombe 1998: 240) or ‘theory at the
lowest level can be an ad hoc classification system, consisting of categories which organise and
summarise empirical observations’ (Bowling 2002: 139).

The label is not important, but the process of establishing a map or framework of how the
research will be conducted and analysed is.

a theoretical framework is an explanatory device ‘which explains either graphically or in
narrative form, the main things to be studied – the key factors, constructs or variables – and the
presumed relationships among them. It is ‘an efficient
mechanism for drawing together and summarizing accumulated facts ... which makes the body of
accumulated knowledge more accessible and, thus, more useful both to practitioners who seek to
implement findings and to researchers who seek to extend the knowledge base.

The review of the literature checklist
1. Evidence of reading will always be required in any research. Though in a small study, it
may not be necessary to produce a full literature review.
2. Researchers collect many facts but then must select, organize and classify findings into a
coherent pattern. The aim is to produce a critical review, not a list of everything you have
read.
3. Your framework will not only provide a map of how the research will be conducted and
analysed but it will also give you ideas about a structure for your review. It will help you
to draw together and summarize facts and findings.
4. Literature reviews should be succinct and, as far as is possible in a small study, should
give a picture of the state of knowledge and of major questions in your topic area. If you
have been able to classify your reading into groups, categories or under headings, writing
your review will be relatively straightforward.
5. Ensure that all references are complete. Note the page numbers of any quotations and
paraphrases of good ideas. You cannot use them without acknowledging the source. If
you do, you may become involved in a plagiarism challenge. It should be possible for any
readers to locate your sources.
6. Watch your language. Perhaps inferences may be drawn, but ‘proof’ is hard to come by
when dealing with human beings. Make no claims which cannot be justified from the
Bell 8
evidence you have presented. Consider again the wording Richardson and Woodley use in
the extract from their article.
7. Examine your sources critically before you decide to use them. Any sign of bias,
inappropriate language, or false claims? Are you able to trust the authors’ judgements?
8. Remember that unless you are comparing like with like, you can make no claims for
comparability. Researchers often start their research from different bases and make use of
different methods of data collecting. You may still wish to use their findings, but be
careful about how you discuss them.
9. Do not be tempted to leave out any reports of research merely because they differ from
your own findings. It can be helpful to include differing results. Discuss whether they
undermine your own case – or not.
10. Start the first draft of your review early in your reading. Many more drafts will be
required before you have a coherent and ‘critical’ account but better to start small and
then build on your first attempt than to have to make sense of everything you have read
at one attempt. As you continue, entries will be deleted and others added, but you will
have made a start. Better to be faced with a badly-written, inadequate review than a blank
page.