Who edits Wikipedia anyway?

Since this week one of the tasks on our to-do list was to get bold enough to edit a page in Wikipedia.  It got me thinking, who edits these pages anyway?  I'll admit, the closest I've ever gotten to an edit was years and years ago when I present when an ex-coworker decided to update the page of the place that we worked with information about how they treated their workers poorly.  Incidentally, that information came down quite quickly, so there are clearly people keeping up these sites.  I decided to do a little research, which I am sharing with you here.

Wikipedia is part of Wikimedia which is fairly transparent about their organizational structure.  This page  explains their hierarchical structure.  Here are some of the highlights:  Wikipedia pages can be edited by anyone and new editors are encouraged to be bold and get involved.  Interestingly, they even have a written encouragement for those more established editors to be friendly to newcomers, including a designated page on not "biting the newcomers." This site includes common errors that newcomers commit and pleas to understand the importance of new editors to the site.

This made me wonder what the community of Wikipedia editors looks like. Because clearly, there are regular editors that spend a good portion of their life.  From Wikipedia's own published information there are 25 million named users but only a portion, 118,000 "Wikimedians" have edited in the last 30 days. Who are these editors?  A 2013 article published on these individuals in The Atlantic claimed that 90% of the editors are male.  More recent information has been published examining more recent information and attempts to make the editing board more diverse.  I'll refrain from giving you a little bit of my social commentary on that one and let you know that I also found out that Wikipedia editing has been in continuous decline since 2005. A recent article in the Guardian states that the rise of mobile technology and the difficulties of using the editing language Wikipedia utilizes on a mobile phone.  But I would guess that the dedicated editors plus the handful of newcomers that come on every so often should be enough to maintain the site.  Keep in mind that at least for the English component, a good majority of the topics are already at least slightly presented on the site.  Think about it, when is the last time you looked for something on Wikipedia and there was absolutely nothing written upon it.  So it should be fair to say that the majority of the editing needed to be done on the site are more recent occurrences, which should also be the topics that are most appealing to editors. So despite the decline in editors, I would imagine that Wikipedia will continue to be a highly used resource in our online world.

The building blocks and HTML

      As graduate students, we are in the business of improving our skills. Of course to do so we constantly are drawing upon our resources.  As I am now more focused on my research in the doctorate program, I am learning more about a number of  different software programs used in linguistic coding/analysis and statistical analysis. Today entering the script for recoding files in a program used for acoustic analysis it reminded me of the same scripts that we write in during SPSS statistic analysis. Immediately, this familiarity brought forth a set of latent skills and reasonable deductions that I could apply in learning the new software.  Furthermrore, these types of scripts have a lot in common with basic HTML coding: the nature of open and closing commands, the rigidity of the process etc.  Although I taught myself a bit of HTML years ago, it just impacted me today how much these skills build upon one another.  The style of learning in coding or programming is so distinct that can be seen as training that can serve when learning new skills.  Some of the basic concepts that are learned here can be expanded upon in the ways we approach other tasks.

       Now, I would say that my ability to remember any of the limited HTML that I taught myself is quite limited, although I did switch over to HTML to fix some formatting issues that copying and pasting a title had caused in my blog a few weeks back.  Did you notice how to do that?

       If you are using Blogger for your course Blog you can switch over to the HTML view pretty easily and even if you don't know much you can start learning here with something as simple as line breaks. I wonder how many of you know any HTML or other types of coding.  If so, did you learn it back from the Live Journal days? Also, have you've seen any of the ways that this benefits you in skills you've learned since?

Sharing my curation of Spanish Language Teaching Resources

As part of our project on knowledge sharing and tracking, I have created a Pintrest site of different Spanish language teaching resources.  I have organized them into five different boards:  Language Teaching Games, Language Teaching Worksheets and Resources, Culture, New Music for Class and Music that I've Used in Class.

As part of my promotion of this resource I shared my site on my Facebook account and encouraged other Spanish teachers that I am friends with on there to interact with the site.  Additionally, I thought I would share it here as well in case any of you are interested in interacting!  Thanks.

Mental health and time spent online

I just made a casual comment to a friend of mine that is going through a rough time about the amount of time I see him on his Smartphone when I am around him. Several studies have popped up in my feeds in social networking resources that I use establishing a link between poor mental health and large amounts of time spent online. A quick search of related articles include an article published in the UK claiming that the government warns a causal relationship between time spent online and mental illness in children, another article warning that teens spend more than 2 hours per day on social networking sites are more likely to present signs of poor mental health and finally another reporting on a study in Sweden which claims a 'central link' between time spent online and sleeping disorders and depression.

Although my limited research seemed to indicate that most studies and articles published on this topic focused largely on children and adolescents, there is also a significant amount of research that examines an adult population.  However, I think when reading on this topic we need to pay attention to the difference between correlational and causal relationships.  While the majority of the articles discuss a "link" between time spent online and mental health, there was little discussion of how exactly, these two issues interact.  What is more likely, that high quantities of online use cause mental illness or that mental illness causes increased use of the internet?  I think the other option would be that the relationship is cyclical, that one of these characteristics feeds into the other and so forth.  Also, it would be interesting to consider how strong the relationship is.  In other words, clearly not everyone that spends high amounts of time online suffers from mental illness or vice versa.  However, it seems like an interesting concept to examine further.

The importance of ease of use and integration with productivity apps

As graduate students, our time in precious.  Anything I can do to be more productive or efficient when I am working frees up just a bit more time for a bit of downtime which is essential to staying sane during grad school.  So productivity apps seem like the perfect thing for me to implement, right?  Well, yes and no.

For me, if my main goal is to use a resource to help me get organized, take better notes or keep my appointments straight there are some key features it needs to provide.  First, I need an app that can be used ideally on my smartphone, my laptop and my office computer.  Secondly, it should be able to easily integrate with whatever other applications I am already using, such as my calendar or even my email.  Then there are some important characteristics of the app itself that I like to consider.  For instance, it needs to be really user friendly.  An app could have the most useful features in the world but if they don't seem logical or easy to use I know myself, I just won't end up using them.  Also, it has to be free, at least for the basic features.  I am a grad student and unless I know I love an app and really want to use it, it just doesn't seem worth the effort to try it out.

Here's a list of four apps I've tried or regularly use (presented in no particular order).

1. Evernote: I've been using Evernote for the last few years and would categorize it as helpful but not necessarily essential to my life.  I looked back over my notes and most seem to be recipes, to do lists, some contact information and some saved photos with comments.   I would say that it's strongest pull for me is the ability to store written, photo or audio notes.

2.  GoogleDrive... is my life.  After emailing myself documents for a ridiculous amount of time or lots of frustrated muttering when I realized I left my USB at home or in the office, I joined the world of cloud storage a few years ago.  And since then, life is simplified.  I can share documents, integrate GoogleDocs into my folders, even download my GoogleDrive on multiple computers.  I don't use it on my phone frequently, but I don't miss that.  This is easily one of the most useful apps I've come across.

3. Dropbox.  Pretty much the same for me as GoogleDrive except I ran out of storage much more quickly.  I personally use dropbox for my collaborations with professors on research and GoogleDrive for all other files, seems to work well to have this division.

4. Do It Tomorrow.  I am a self-professed lover of all things lists and grids so this seemed like a good idea for a while.  You check off the things you do and then whatever is left undone goes to a list for tomorrow.  A bit too simple for me, I found myself wanting to make sublists and change the order/priority of tasks and it was quite limited.

My next task planner to try out is called Swipes.  I'll install it soon and let you know what I think about it. 

NYC to turn garbage cans into wifi spots

As a Star Wars fan, I swear that one of my favorite moments was when I was walking through a street fair in Lima, Peru and saw a trash can that had been modified to look like R2D2. I know I have a picture of it *somewhere* but unfortunately we still need a way to create a search bar that sorts your photos and detects the objects/people you are looking for.  Or perhaps I just need to go back through my collection and create a better organizational system.

Regardless, this image keeps popping into my mind whenever I think about the new proposal by a NYC waste collection company that is aiming to transform public garbage containers into wi-fi hot-spots.  This is just another sign that we are in a digital age that is pushing each day closer to an open-access society.  Of course, questions should be raised about what type of data may be collected or what types of advertisements present for the company to make revenue from their investment.  I also hope that the signal is strong, because the image of folks cuddling up against trash cans to get a strong signal seems a bit rough in NY of all places. However, I really appreciate the benefits of this proposal on the city's residents and the millions of tourists that pass through each year.  The use of public space would be further encouraged if individuals have wifi access on the city streets. A number of questions arise though.  Would connection to these hotspots be automatic and seamless?  For example, would someone riding a bus be able to continuously connect to each hotspot as they pass by, maintaining somewhat continuous access or just have short periods of access as the bus came to each stop?

I am excited to see how this turns out!

The role of twitter and the hashtag in the #BlackLivesMatter movement (final post week 3)

It would be hard for anyone to still be oblivious to social justice movement that has recently gained strength and publicity in our country.  The #BlackLivesMatter movement began after the killing of Trayvon Martin in Orlando, FL in 2012. After the events occurring in Ferguson, the movement received nationwide attention from mainstream media sources and the topic was commonly discussed in public and private spaces all over our country.   The unfortunate reality is that a number of situations have continuously occurred in the time since the founding of this movement, namely between police and black communities and individuals.

It is noteworthy that the name of the movement is written with a hashtag at the beginning.  On the webpage of the organizers of the movement the homepage identifies the name of the movement with a hashtag at the beginning.

Image taken from https://wikimedia.org/ and used with Creative Commons licensing

A short selection of the hashtags that the movement has produced include the following: #blacklivesmatter, #handsupdontshoot, #heisnotasuspect, #ferguson, #thisstopstoday, #icantbreathe, #alivewhileblack and most recently following the suspect death in policy custody of acitivist Sandra Bland the newest hashtag #ifidieinpolicecustody.  For those interested, this article powerfully discusses the topic and shows some of the tweets using this hashtag.

Without steering this into a political discussion, I think there is a peripheral lesson that can be learned from the way the use of social media to drive the movement has spread like wildfire.  What I mean to say is that the prominent role of social media (especially Twitter and Instagram) in this movement (as well as many, many others such as the funding drive for ALS or the Arab Spring to name a few) can provide us a reminder of the prominence and power of social media in our lives and especially in the younger generations' lives.  It provides a forum for mass dissemination of information, commentaries, and perspectives unfiltered by other sources.  Many claim that it was precisely the power of the many voices in social media that pressured mainstream media to take the movement seriously and cover the stories coming out of various US cities.  This serves as another reminder of how Web 2.0 resources are shaping our lives and the direction of history.