2010/1/13 Bagarulu CIS and INC event. CPOV: Wikipedia and the Politics of Open Knowledge

1. Re-Appropriating WP
Shih-Chieh Ilya Li
CITI, Academia Sinica / TELDAP
at #WikiWars, Bangarulu, 2010/1/13

2. TOC
• Breaking News
• Major Failure Experience
• The Story of Holopedia, or zh-min-nan.WP
• Conclusion

4. Re-appropriate
• Thinking from the user’s perspective
• Taiwanese user experience: en. vs. zh.WP
• Appropriate vs. re-appropriate

5. My Museum Paper
• “Seeing Thru The Silos: Exploring Museums’
Second Lives”
• Using theories and Second Life to
rediscover the “archive-user” duplet
• Explaining the “museum-like” behavior
• Reintegrate online digital archive as part of
the digital culture experience

6. Major Failure Exp.
• Lack of content
• Bureaucratic / ignorance / user unfriendly
• High entry barrier
• Not even matching our own everyday
language(s) experience

7. The Story of Holopedia, or
zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org
(Collaborated with @pektiong)

8. More Failures
• Ancient story before Traditional/Simplified
Chinese auto-conversion
• Early WP Taiwanese user thinks: why not
fork one version of WP of our own?
• The difficulties to apply a new WP
• Only “ISO 639-1/2” Lang. code accepted
• zh=Chinese=?=Mandarin Chinese
• Where are us w/o characters?

9. Appropriation 1
• Purchasing domain “holopedia.org”
• Installing/Using Mediawiki [Open Source
Software]
• Couldn’t update / bugfix successfully
• Couldn’t connect to other lang. version of
wikipedia

10. Holopedia Initiators
• Tân Pek-tiong
(California, USA)
• Tân-tēn Hong-giâu
(New Jersey, USA)
• Tè Khái-sū
(Oxford, UK)

11. Making Decisions
• Decided to use (Pe̍h-ōe-jī,POJ)
• Originally created & used by Presbyterian
missionaries in Fujian, China19 century
• Redeveloped to describe Hakka and
other aboriginal languages in Taiwan
• Apply to WP again in 2004/2005, accepted

12. Battling Multiple Fronts
• Problems of digitizing before standardizing
• Pan-Chineselization vs. independent lang.
• Culture revitalization
• All direction of technical issues
• Community challenges
• Too early, too far away

13. 2005 Culture Study
Conference in Taiwan

14. New Impacts
• Chinese dialects WP emerges
• ( ), ( ), ( ), ( ),
( ), ( ), ( )
• HQ New knowledge accumulated/communicated
• Hui-hêng-ki: Hui-hêng-ki (iā-sī hui-lêng-ki, hui-
ki) sī ē- tàng lī-iōng khong-khì, tī tāi-khì-chân
hōan-ûi lāi hui- hêng ê hui-hêng-khì. Àn-chiàu
tēng-gī, hui-hêng-ki ū kok- chióng ê hêng-sek,
pau-koat:

15. Toward FormosanPedia
• Extending zh-min-nan.WP exp. to other
minority languages in Taiwan
• Accumulating and connecting resources
• Thru digital archive and WP to revitalize
dying traditional oral culture

16. Conclusion

17. Ways of Re-appropriation
• Forking the Encyclopedia
• Lazy People’s Archive
• Artistic Sabotage /
• “Where the user re-appropriate...”

18. Thanks for UR Attention!
@ilya / ilya.myid.tw