The Wikipedia Community received on 25 november 2015, the erasmus prize at the royal Palace on the Dam square in Amsterdam. The price was lwa awarded by king Willem-Alexander to three representatives of the community, among whom the Dutchman Lodewijk Gelauff.
With the award, which recognizes the Foundation Praemium Erasmianum foundation, the importance of the community that is Wikipedia. Lodewijk Gelauff is, among others, the initiator of the annual Wiki loves Monuments program. That program should provide users of Wikipedia encourage to monuments and cultural heritage on the photo to convert and free to share via Wikipedia. Gelauff started the project in 2010 in the Netherlands and it has since been globally adopted.
The two other recipients of the award come from Brazil and the United States. Adele Vrana from Brazil is engaged with Wikipedia Zero. With this project it is tried Wikipedia, free, available to everyone via mobile telephony providers, in particular in Africa and Latin America. The American Phoebe Ayers is busy figuring out how libraries and Wikipedia can strengthen each other. Ayers is also an academic librarian at MIT. Vrana works for the Wikimedia foundation. Completely in the style of Wikipedia, there was advance discussion about the people that the price received.
These discussions are a great advantage but also a disadvantage of Wikipedia, as it turned out during the presentation. On the one hand, it was praised for that as much as possible is preserved and all is visible for everyone which makes Wikipedia very transparent in how lemma’s by the time its built and what the discussions behind contentious themes. Incidentally, it is even in Wikipedia articles or discussions to fully remove. On the other hand, it ensures that members of the community have a thick skin when it comes to the creation or change of articles, something that has recently also in the Groene Amsterdammer highlights. In addition to the need to have a thick skin, the community there is also the problem that the majority of Wikipedians, especially from white men.
But all of those disputes also prove to be interesting research material. So there is Contropedia.net, a research platform that uses the conflict on Wikipedia. So there was much discussion about the warming of the earth between 2005 and mid-2008, after which the number of changes and a rapidly growing population. Contropedia makes use of the history and discussion pages. At a symposium of the Royal netherlands Academy for Sciences on Wikipedia on 15 January this year, said Wikipedia founder Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Wales against the public that ‘smart journalists to the talk page to find out what is going on around certain topics. It is also looking at the same entries in different languages useful world different points of view to investigate.
Wales spoke further about the open nature of Wikipedia and the fact that Wikipedia especially in the western world is read and used. One of the things that he aanstipte, was the difference in the use of the internet. In the largest part of the world, people are using mobile phones to access the internet to browse and Wikipedia was there for a long time not being very useful. But not only the accessibility via mobile phones is a problem, according to Wales, also the amounts for the use of the internet consideration must be, hence that Wikimedia stands for free access to Wikipedia via mobile networks.
In western countries seems to be the growth there, however. That is partly because many entries already written, but also by a kind of ‘wikimoeheid’. Also, people come less often on Wikipedia because the search engines the lemma’s use in their search results. Because of this, people do not click through to Wikipedia, something that may make people less edit.