Los artículos sobre marcas, empresas y organizaciones en Wikipedia son abundantes. Investigaciones realizadas en el contexto norteamericano y europeo reclaman su valor para la comunicación ...corporativa, en especial a nivel de la reputación. Este artículo se centra en la influencia potencial de este tipo de contenidos en el caso de empresas latinoamericanas. Datos estadísticos de acceso abierto, de los que se identificaron los picos de tráfico más sobresalientes, fueron asociados a hechos noticiosos con el fin de profundizar en dicha influencia. Los hallazgos evidencian que el acceso a los artículos corporativos es afectado de forma considerable por acontecimientos de interés público que involucran a las empresas.
Na era digital, a cibercultura torna-se essencial e com ela surgem novos desafios e necessidades, em particular na área da educação. Com vista a contextualizar as wikis nesta nova era, apresenta-se, ...neste texto, uma reflexão sobre os pilares da cibercultura, segundo Pierre Lévy. Reflete-se ainda sobre o papel que as wikis podem assumir enquanto instrumentos pedagógicos e como promotores da construção de conhecimento, evidenciando quais as suas principais características e em que medida são adequadas à criação de comunidades de aprendizagem.
Findings are reported from student focus groups and a large-scale survey about how and why students (enrolled at six different U.S. colleges) use Wikipedia during the course-related research process. ...A majority of respondents frequently used Wikipedia for background information, but less often than they used other common resources, such as course readings and Google. Architecture, engineering, and science majors were more likely to use Wikipedia for course-related research than respondents in other majors. The findings suggest Wikipedia is used in combination with other information resources. Wikipedia meets the needs of college students because it offers a mixture of coverage, currency, convenience, and comprehensibility in a world where credibility is less of a given or an expectation from today’s students.
Estimated daily number of tweets on climate change originating from different countries. The bars represent the most active urban areas; bar height represents tweeting activity with the maximum of ...277 tweets/day in the London metropolitan area.
•1.8 million Twitter messages on climate change collected and analyzed.•Twitter's data model addresses the “who says what…to whom” communication formula.•The major 2012 news events that affected tweeting on climate change.•The geography of worldwide climate change discussion on Twitter.•Climate discussion on Twitter is concentrated and dominated by relatively few opinion leaders.
Public perceptions of climate change are traditionally measured through surveys. The exploding popularity of social networks, however, presents a new opportunity to research the spatiotemporal pattern of public discourse in relation to natural and/or socio-economic events. Among the social networks, Twitter is one of the largest microblogging services. The architecture of Twitter makes the question “what's happening?” the cornerstone of information exchange. This inspired the notion of using Twitter users as distributed sensors, which has been successfully employed in both the natural and social sciences. In 2012 and 2013, we collected 1.8 million tweets on “climate change” and “global warming” in five major languages (English, German, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish). We discuss the geography of tweeting, weekly and daily patterns, major news events that affected tweeting on climate change, changes in the central topics of discussion over time, the most authoritative traditional media, blogging, and the most authoritative organizational sources of information on climate change referenced by Twitter users in different countries. We anticipate that social network mining will become a major source of data in the public discourse on climate change.
Since its inception six years ago, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has accumulated 6.40 million articles and 250 million edits, contributed in a predominantly undirected and haphazard fashion by ...5.77 million unvetted volunteers. Despite the apparent lack of order, the 50 million edits by 4.8 million contributors to the 1.5 million articles in the English–language Wikipedia follow strong certain overall regularities. We show that the accretion of edits to an article is described by a simple stochastic mechanism, resulting in a heavy tail of highly visible articles with a large number of edits. We also demonstrate a crucial correlation between article quality and number of edits, which validates Wikipedia as a successful collaborative effort.
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are membraneous vesicles released by a variety of cells into their microenvironment. Recent studies have elucidated the role of EVs in intercellular communication, ...pathogenesis, drug, vaccine and gene-vector delivery, and as possible reservoirs of biomarkers. These findings have generated immense interest, along with an exponential increase in molecular data pertaining to EVs. Here, we describe Vesiclepedia, a manually curated compendium of molecular data (lipid, RNA, and protein) identified in different classes of EVs from more than 300 independent studies published over the past several years. Even though databases are indispensable resources for the scientific community, recent studies have shown that more than 50% of the databases are not regularly updated. In addition, more than 20% of the database links are inactive. To prevent such database and link decay, we have initiated a continuous community annotation project with the active involvement of EV researchers. The EV research community can set a gold standard in data sharing with Vesiclepedia, which could evolve as a primary resource for the field.
The Internet-based encyclopaedia Wikipedia has grown to become one of the most visited Web sites on the Internet, but critics have questioned the quality of entries. An empirical study of Wikipedia ...found errors in a 2005 sample of science entries. Biased coverage and lack of sources are among the "Wikipedia risks." This paper describes a simple assessment of these aspects by examining the outbound links from Wikipedia articles to articles in scientific journals with a comparison against journal statistics from Journal Citation Reports such as impact factors. The results show an increasing use of structured citation markup and good agreement with citation patterns seen in the scientific literature though with a slight tendency to cite articles in high-impact journals such as Nature and Science. These results increase confidence in Wikipedia as a reliable information resource for science in general.
•The climate sceptical blogosphere is identified as a network of 171 blogs.•An overt science framing appears to contribute to the most central blogs’ positions.•The most central blogs may be seen as ...key nodes in an alternative knowledge network.•They are alternative public sites of expertise for a climate sceptical audience.
While mainstream scientific knowledge production has been extensively examined in the academic literature, comparatively little is known about alternative networks of scientific knowledge production. Online sources such as blogs are an especially under-investigated site of knowledge contestation. Using degree centrality and node betweenness tests from social network analysis, and thematic content analysis of individual posts, this research identifies and critically examines the climate sceptical blogosphere and investigates whether a focus on particular themes contributes to the positioning of the most central blogs. A network of 171 individual blogs is identified, with three blogs in particular found to be the most central: Climate Audit, JoNova and Watts Up With That. These blogs predominantly focus on the scientific element of the climate debate, providing either a direct scientifically-based challenge to mainstream climate science, or a critique of the conduct of the climate science system. This overt scientific framing, as opposed to explicitly highlighting differences in values, politics, or ideological worldview, appears to be an important contributory factor in the positioning of the most central blogs. It is suggested that these central blogs are key protagonists in a process of attempted expert knowledge de-legitimisation and contestation, acting not only as translators between scientific research and lay audiences, but, in their reinterpretation of existing climate science knowledge claims, are acting themselves as alternative public sites of expertise for a climate sceptical audience.
The current paper presents a comparative analysis of forums and wikis as tools for online collaborative learning. The comparison was developed analyzing the data collected during a collaborative ...experience in an asynchronous e-learning environment. The activities lasted five weeks and consisted of forum discussions and designing a project in a wiki environment. The research method included both quantitative and qualitative analyses. A quantitative comparison of forums and wikis was developed applying the coding scheme based on the following indicators: (1) inferencing, (2) producing, (3) developing, (4) evaluating, (5) summarizing, (6) organizing, and (7) supporting. The qualitative aspects were assessed using an open-ended questionnaire for collecting participants’ perspectives on the functionality of the collaborative tools. Results provided evidence of the different processes during the forum and wiki activities: processes such as inferencing, evaluating, organizing and supporting characterized forum discussions while wikis induced mainly processes of producing and developing. Different purposes were also evident: forums were useful for discussing, sharing ideas while wikis were used for developing a common collaborative document. In addition, the perceived time involved in performing the activities was different: forums were easier to access than wikis, while wikis required more time and were more difficult to use than forums. As a general conclusion it is not possible to state the superiority of one tool over another because each has its own characteristics and could be used with different purposes. Forums and wikis could have complementary functions and should be organized to complete each other for scaffolding students’ self-regulated strategies and learning. The findings are discussed in the framework of designing collaborative virtual courses with proper tool selection.
•Forums and wikis activities were compared for processes and functions.•The knowledge construction processes were analyzed using content analysis.•Forums activate mainly processes of inferencing, evaluating, organizing and supporting.•Wikis induce mainly processes of producing and developing.•Each tool has his own characteristics and functions and is complementary to the other.
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