Wikipedia - Collaborative Peer Production

This blog aims to demonstrate and problematize the potential of collaborative peer production through the Wikipedia article on the political movement "Taiwan independence".

22.5.07

Collaborative peer production allows Wikipedia to obtain mass amounts of information from people with different location, cultural background, written language and etc on its articles. Users living in different locations or have received dissimilar teachings may perceive and respond to an issue in a different way. In the issue of “Taiwan independence”, Wikipedians with a People’s Republic of China background may share different views to the subject as to Wikipedians who are from Taiwan. Through editing the article by both parties, readers will be able to gain insights to the different ways the two conflicting groups views the issue of Taiwan independence. In physically existing encyclopedias, updates are nonexistent unless users are willing to pay for a newer version of the set of books. Through Wikipedia, users are also allowed to be up to date with the information regarding the topic as with the many volunteers working on the article, there is high likelihood of a Wikipedian updating the article when a related news break out. Even though some view Taiwan’s struggle for independence began in the 1600s, it is only recent years where most of the movement took place. Frequent updates on the matter are crucial in relations to “Taiwan independence” as any move made by either government on the topic will affect the timeliness of the article, and the accuracy of the content. With no editors, Wikipedia lets its contents be on time. If every time a change is made on the “Taiwan independence” article, the editor would have many pieces of information to read and research through and it would no doubt reduce the speed in which the articles are updates. Therefore the article may loose its accuracy and users would be presented and perhaps misled with out of date information.

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