Page 13 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

NotabilityThis is a topic of discussion and lengthy arguments – a sort of entelechy built of various conceptions and reasoning. If Wikipedia’s notability policy – that is, what should and should not remain on its pages – is examined carefully, it can be found to be vague and relative.Despite the established aim to include and fully cover a particular subject in Wikipedia, and the fact that the free encyclopaedia seeks to break away from the structured model of what an encyclopaedia can or should include, as it has surpassed the coverage of a twentieth-century encyclopaedia, there are di erent methods for judging what should and should not go in it.As Famiglietti points out (2011), concern about physically restricting content as a main guideline has shifted to concern about the permanence of information that is trivial or seeks to convey a particular viewpoint. Editorial criteria, formerly determined by physical factors in knowledge- related projects, are thus subject to a completely di erent dismissal rule in Wikipedia.Discussions and explanations given to people who approach the encyclopaedia with di erent interests and reasons as to why their article should be deleted are everyday matters. Above all, behind the people who keep the project running – jobs without duration, not subjectto a recruitment process – is the awareness that Wikipedia is vast but not in nite. It does not aspire to be a boundless resource. It has its bounds, but is more integrating and inclusive of what culture, in the most open and elementary sense of the word, has produced in humans.Policies and style guidesWikipedia has its own collectively compiled Manual of Style.4 On what, or what rules, could it base its initial precepts? The people who collaborate on the Spanish-language edition are scattered around the world from the United States to Patagonia and across Spain, which in2015 was producing the most edits. This is no easy decision as it must meet the linguistic needs of a region whose relationship with the language dates back ve centuries, marked by interaction with another dense web of languages.Wikipedia has its own collectively compiled Manual of Style and its entire content is decided on by common consent to ensure continuous improvement.Naturally there needs to be a basic style manual with guidelines on how to express certain words, terms, neologisms, contextual or speci c words, scienti c terms and chemical formulas, and Wikipedia is based on and constantly interacts with another project of the Wikimedia Foundation called Wiktionary (Wikcionario in Spanish) made up of entries providing further knowledge on a particular word.Some years ago there was a paradigmatic debate among Spanish-speaking Wikipedians on the use of mouse versus ratón.5 Which is the correct name in Spanish for this computer device? Spaniards defended their usual ratón [derived from the Spanish name for the animal]. The contributors from other Spanish-speaking countries argued that Spain was the only country in the worldto use the term, while Spanish Wikipedianscited the Diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua in support of their claim. But using a term not generally employed in the so-called Latin American countries was of no bene t to Spanish-speakers in countries other than Spain. Such divergences arise in a variety of areas: place names, euphemisms, names for the same event – all these are daily topics of discussion among Wikipedia’s collaborators to reach agreement on how to present the information to the public at large.Discussions among the community on various issues are characterised by their exhaustiveness, detail and heated nature. When a piece of data or a whole article is revised it may or may notAC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 201613Smart Culture: Impact of the Internet on Artistic Creation