Wikipedia:WikipediaWeekly/Episode77

Episode 77: Wikipedia's Television Coverage: a Discussion with TV Scholar Jason Mittell Recording: 11 am EST (15:00 UTC), Thursday, 21 May

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Participants:

• Jason Mittell
• Sage Ross
• Andrew Lih
• ?
• ?
• ?

Relevant readings

• Mittell's blog, http://justtv.wordpress.com/, will give you some idea of his perspective on television. See also his Wikipedia article, Jason Mittell.
  • The Wire and the Serial Procedural: An Essay in Progress (2007)
  • The Lost Payoff (2009, post season finale)

Topics

• Lost (TV series) article
• The Wire article
• Wikipedia's coverage of TV vs. television studies scholarship
  • Interpretation and original research
• fan wikis
  • Mittell's essay on Lostpedia: http://justtv.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/lp/ (password protected, available to discussion participants)
  • The shadow of wikipedia and "non-encyclopedic cruft"
  • Battlestar Wiki and Toton, just the facts
  • Henry Jenkins and Twin Peaks analogy of VCR as tool
  • Star Trek Blueprints and Technical Manual as forerunner
  • The Pairing page -- how much do you let a community to go "off the grid" and create its own grassroots offshoot? Not unlike Wikipedia's games pages, or BJAODN, or userboxes. Can that actually hurt community to curtail this? Voltaire: The superfluous is very necessary.
• gender and wikis

Questions

• Interesting observation: "Toton’s analysis suggests that wikis as a platform seem to be best suited to such typically masculinist pursuits of cataloguing and analyzing, more than feminine creativity and community (Toton, 2008)"
  • Is this a widely accepted explanation of two different poles in this space?

• From his essay: "I’m more interested today in how Lostpedia goes beyond the realm of data collection, as there are elaborated policies on how to treat borderline material such as speculation, hypotheses, fanon, parody, and fan-generated paratexts. How do the users who generate the site’s content make these distinctions and decide on such policies? And how does the wiki system enact policies and put them into practice?"
  • Compared to Wikipedia's "no original research" you have encouraged it, in what seems to be the right dosage. How did it evolve?