The inclusivity of Wikipedia and the drawing of expert boundaries: An examination of talk pages and reference lists

Wikipedia is frequently viewed as an inclusive medium. But inclusivity within this online encyclopedia is not a simple matter of just allowing anyone to contribute. In its quest for legitimacy as an encyclopedia, Wikipedia relies on outsiders to judge claims championed by rival editors. In choosing these experts, Wikipedians define the boundaries of acceptable comment on any given subject. Inclusivity then becomes a matter of how the boundaries of expertise are drawn. In this article I examine the nature of these boundaries and the implications they have for inclusivity and credibility as revealed through the talk pages produced and sources used by a particular subset of Wikipedia's creators—those involved in writing articles on the topic of Philippine history. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

[1]  Marshall S. Mclennan.  The Central Luzon Plain : land and society on the inland frontier , 1980 .

[2]  Birger Hjørland,et al.  Epistemology and the socio-cognitive perspective in information science , 2002, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[3]  Isto Huvila.  Where does the information come from? Information source use patterns in Wikipedia , 2010, Inf. Res..

[4]  R. Kessler.  Rebellion and Repression in the Philippines , 1989 .

[5]  D. Wurfel.  Filipino Politics: Development and Decay , 1988 .

[6]  Jutta Haider,et al.  Beyond the Legacy of the Enlightenment? Online Encyclopaedias as Digital Heterotopias , 2010, First Monday.

[7]  J. P. Bolongaita,et al.  Roots of conflict : Muslims, Christians, and the Mindanao struggle , 1997 .

[8]  Walden Bello,et al.  The Anti-Development State: The Political Economy of Permanent Crisis in the Philippines , 2005 .

[9]  N. Tracy.  Manila Ransomed: The British Assault on Manila in the Seven Years War , 1995 .

[10]  Brendan Luyt,et al.  Revisiting the syntactical and structural analysis of Library of Congress Subject Headings for the digital environment , 2010 .

[11]  G. D. Vugt.  Dare to edit! - the politics of Wikipedia , 2010 .

[12]  H. Albrechtsen,et al.  Toward a New Horizon in Information Science: Domain-Analysis , 1995, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[13]  John G. Breslin,et al.  A Content Analysis: How Wikipedia Talk Pages Are Used , 2010 .

[14]  Raymond Bonner.  Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy , 1987 .

[15]  Vernon R. Totanes.  History of the Filipino People and Martial Law: A Forgotten Chapter in the History of a History Book, 1960–2010 , 2012 .

[16]  Mathieu O'Neil,et al.  Wikipedia and authority , 2011 .

[17]  Jamshid Beheshti,et al.  Collaboration in Context: Comparing Article Evolution among Subject Disciplines in Wikipedia , 2008, First Monday.

[18]  Nathaniel Tkacz.  Power, Visibility, Wikipedia , 2007 .

[19]  F. Bunge,et al.  Philippines : a country study , 1983 .

[20]  Anselm Spoerri,et al.  What is popular on Wikipedia and why? , 2007, First Monday.

[21]  Nicolas Bencherki,et al.  Writing a Wikipedia Article: Data Mining and Organizational Communication to Explain the Practices By Which Contributors Maintain the Article's Coherence , 2008 .

[22]  Philippines Visayas,et al.  The University of the Philippines , 1942, Nature.

[23]  S. Wineburg.  On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach Between School and Academy , 1991 .

[24]  Olof Sundin,et al.  Janitors of knowledge: constructing knowledge in the everyday life of Wikipedia editors , 2011, J. Documentation.

[25]  R. K. Edgerton.  The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines , 1978 .

[26]  Martin Wattenberg,et al.  Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations , 2004, CHI.

[27]  Avon Crismore.  The Rhetoric of Textbooks: Metadiscourse , 1984 .

[28]  E. Hartelius,et al.  Wikipedia and the Emergence of Dialogic Expertise , 2010 .

[29]  Nathan Quimpo.  Contested Democracy and The Left in the Philippines After Marcos , 2008 .

[30]  F. L. Starner.  Magsaysay and the Philippine peasantry. The agrarian impact on Philippine politics, 1953-1956. , 1962 .

[31]  Ricardo Manapat.  Some Are Smarter than Others: The History of Marcos' Crony Capitalism , 1991 .

[32]  D. Rosenberg.  Marcos and Martial Law in the Philippines , 1980 .

[33]  G. Goodman,et al.  Ramon Magsaysay : a political biography , 1973, Journal of Asian Studies.

[34]  Brendan Luyt,et al.  Improving Wikipedia's credibility: References and citations in a sample of history articles , 2010, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..