Category: English

One of the universal features of human sociality is the fact that our social networks are highly integrated – human societies exhibit several nested social layers including families, bands and communities. Several factors have been identified as creati…

Mnopedia is the recently created, born digital encyclopedia of the state of Minnesota. It is a project of the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS), the state’s leading cultural heritage institution and one of the largest and oldest historical societies …

Above my desk is a quote by Albert Einstein: “Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are still greater.” One of Einstein’s problems, of course, was that since he was a pioneer, there were not many who could give…

The launch and rapid domination of Wikipedia as a reference tool for the Internet was as dramatic as it was unexpected. Wikipedia broke so many of the rules of reference publishing, which, even if not formally codified, had been widely accepted for man…

Though digital media have unquestionably affected the features and functions of modern encyclopedias, such works also continue to be shaped by factors thoroughly conventional by the end of the historical Enlightenment. As William Smellie, editor of the…

Store norske leksikon (SNL) [Great Norwegian Encyclopaedia] is an edited, online encyclopaedia that strives towards radical transparency. Our aim is for as many parts of text production as possible to be visible to everyone, much like in the model that…

Through the integrated framework of participation theory and political economy, this article analyzes participatory opportunities in the virtual world Habbo Hotel, and how participation is constrained and framed by the producer’s commercial strategies,…

The death of the encyclopaedia is increasingly reported in connection with the abandonment of hard copy reference publishing, the dispersal of library reference collections and the preference for end-users to seek information from search engines and so…

Information increasingly flows from smart online knowledge systems, based on ‘collective intelligence’, and to the more traditional form of knowledge production that takes place within academia. Looking specifically at the case of Wikipedia, and at how…