In recent weeks, the world has followed the popular protests overthrow dictators in the Middle Eastwhole. These revolutions has been called "Twitter revolutions" or "Facebook revolutions", and although these claims are somewhat exaggerated, they are also not entirely fanciful. The truth is always more complex and more interesting than simple bromides can capture.
It is worth taking a look beyond these contemporary events to see what's going on. What other tools people use to call for greater transparency, openness and honesty from institutions? How can you get involved online and offline, with thoughtful people who seek to make a better world?
German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has announced his resignation after admitting that he had plagiarised parts of his PhD from the University of Bayreuth. Online Tools played a major role in exposing his methods: for almost two weeks a group worked to identify the specific sections from his dissertation, was lifted from other sources. When they realized that Google Docs – although a useful tool for small team collaboration – was not the right platform for mass participation in the project, they have created a "wiki" (a site for collaborative works) with the name PlagiPedia to manage the effort.
In a few days the wiki went into overdrive: from any page views on 16. February to almost 2 m 18 February. A University investigation – culminated in decision described by the Anonymous Weber-Wulff, professor of media and data processing at the Berlin university, as the fastest of a German academic institution in 400 years – resulted in the withdrawal of Zu Guttenberg doctorate. To date, the wiki has received 40,000 observations and 15,000 Facebook "likes", and there are 1,224 pages on the explore details about accusations of plagiarism against him.
Last week a other wiki was launched in order to examine whether Saif Gaddafi's PhD dissertation from the London School of Economics included plagiarism. A few days later, Britain's Media standards Trust unveiled a Web site called churnalism.com, which helps expose plagiarism in the media. By pasting press releases in a "churn engine" can readers discover the extent to which they have been recycled, Word for word in online news articles. The Internet is thought to have promoted a cut-and-paste culture of uncritical plagiarism: school teachers and university lecturers in particular regularly complain about coursework lifted straight from the Web site that is running the Wikipedia., But if no other sites such as Plagipedia and churnalism.com shows us that the Internet is fully able to correct its own Follies.
Saif Gaddafi is obviously guilty of much worse than plagiarism. But his history with the LSE is a black mark for the institution, and in particular for examiners, which the Lord Desai, who approved his thesis. We may be able to forgive them, some aspects of this – plagiarism is sometimes notoriously difficult to detect, especially when you have only a small selection of experts makes it examines.
In open source software world we have a saying: "many eyeballs make all bugs shallow". Many people are working together to search plagiarism can also be dramatically more efficient than only a few.
What we cannot forgive, is, however, Lord Desai cowardly response for the allegations. Desai calls on LSE not to disown Saif Gaddafi, in spite of it all. "The man is evil enough-you don't have to add that he is a plagiarist," he said. Actually, yes we need to add that, but not for what it says about him, but what it says about the lack of institutional control on LSE and, perhaps, most of the other institutions.
Opportunities for Community action to achieve a wiki form expanding daily, as more people become active online and online activism mature beyond what has been rightly reviled as "clicktivism" – platter of clicking "like" for some reason, or distribute a single Tweet and feeling as if you have done something.
Some, such as Malcolm gladwell, has criticized the concept of "Twitter revolutions," says lightweight network of people who do not know each other not the beginning and end of activism, although they have played a part. Gladwell has a point, but he overlooked the deeper net come together online. These are networks of people who know each other over a period of years, and not just online but in the face to face meetings; network of people who spend an enormous amount of time on Wikipedia, discuss, debate, learning and work passionately to get things right.
We do not know the whole story about uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya for several years. But when we do, we certainly want to discover, although these revolutions came along with the speed of the Internet and to mobile phones, SMS, Facebook and Twitter were important tools for the organisation of the grass-roots movement, there was also something much deeper go on. These revolutions was the product of thoughtful people, working together for a longer period of time, to find friends, plans and support hopes and dreams for the common future.
• Under the heading of this article was amended on 2. March to the, who appeared in the newspaper
No comments:
Post a Comment