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The purpose of this paper is to examine the rather unsuccessful Wikiproject for Cambodia. Despite its lack of success, it is a case that can be used to draw lessens for dealing with the issue of geographical under-representation on Wikipedia as a whole. After presenting evidence of the Wikiproject’s failure to achieve the goals for which it was created, the author will discuss the pressing issues of imbalances in geographical coverage on Wikipedia as well as the deeper issues involved in remedying these imbalances, namely, the question of who gets to represent whom.

The author takes a broadly qualitative approach to the study of Wikipedia. For this study, the Cambodia Wikiproject main page, as well as the various talk page archives associated with it, was downloaded in November 2016 and subjected to a content analysis. Descriptive statistics are also used when necessary to build the argument.

Wikiproject Cambodia has failed to appreciably improve the coverage of Cambodian topics. This is likely due to its inability to attract for a prolonged period of time a champion able to anchor the project and provide a sense that someone is listening. But the makeup of the project members also suggests that even if a champion could be found, the question of who gets to represent whom remains difficult to deal with. It is unlikely that Cambodia will anytime soon develop a strong community of Wikipedia editors given the economic and social constraints the country imposes on the most of its population.

This work builds on the small, but growing body of literature dealing with coverage gaps in Wikipedia. Given Wikipedia’s growing importance as part of the everyday information infrastructure people use, such gaps and potential solutions to these gaps should be a vital part of the information science community’s agenda.

The astonishing thing about Wikipedia is that despite the way it is produced, the product is as good as it is and not far worse. But this is no reason for complacency. As others have documented, Wikipedia has representational blind spots, produced by the nature of its editorial community and their discursive conventions. This article wishes to look at the potential effect of sources on certain of these blind spots.

The author used an extended example, the Wikipedia article on the Philippine–American War, to illustrate the unfortunate effects that accompany a lack of attention to the kind of sources used to produce narratives for the online encyclopaedia. The Philippine–American War article was chosen because of its importance to American history. The war brought to the fore a debate over the future of the USA and the legitimacy of a republic acquiring overseas colonies. It remains controversial today, making it essential that its representation on Wikipedia is soundly constructed.

Inattention to sources (a lack of bibliographical imagination) produces representational anomalies. Certain sources are privileged when they should not be and others are ignored or considered as sub-standard. Overall, the epistemological boundaries of the article in terms of what the editorial community considers reliable and what the community of scholars producing knowledge about the war think as reliable do not overlap to the extent that they should. The resulting narrative is therefore less rich than it otherwise could be.

While there exists a growing literature on the representational blind spots of Wikipedia (gender, class, geographical region and so on), the focus has been on the composition of the demographics of the editorial community. But equally important to the problem of representation are the sources used by that community. Much literature has been written that seeks to portray the social world of the marginalized, but it is not used on Wikipedia, despite it easily meeting the criteria for reliability set by the Wikipedia community. This is a tragic oversight that makes Wikipedia's aim to be a repository for the knowledge of the world, a laudable goal to strive for, even if in reality unobtainable, even harder to achieve than ever.

The advent and wide use of new digital technologies suggests that the internet is becoming a powerful new media for the imagination of city space. If this is the case then issues concerning urban representation on social media platforms such as Wikipedia provide an area of overlap and interest between urban studies and information studies. The purpose of this paper is to examine the representation of Manila, Philippines, one of the world’s major mega cities, on the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The author’s broad approach to the study of Wikipedia is qualitative in nature. For this study the entire Metro Manila article was downloaded on March 16, 2015 and subjected to textual analysis.

While the Wikipedia article on Manila cannot be classified as promotional, it is clear that much of the city remains invisible in this work. Such a puzzle becomes understandable when we examine the urban studies literature where we find that the spatial logic of the city itself helps conceal much from view, so that what we read on Wikipedia is a view from the islands of privilege rather than the oceans of marginalization that make up much of the city’s spatial form. If such a spatial structure is to change, representations such as found on Wikipedia need to be challenged.

Wikipedia is a key element of today’s information infrastructure yet despite its importance it remains relatively understudied within the field of information science. More specifically, the role of Wikipedia in representing cities, the dominant settlement form in the world today, has not been previously studied.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate tertiary students’ acceptance of digital game-based learning (DGBL). Specifically, it investigated the influence of learning motivation, enjoyment, and perceived usefulness on students’ behavioral intention to play an information literacy (IL) game.

In total, 150 tertiary students were recruited to play an IL game, and fill in a survey questionnaire. Multiple linear regression was performed.

Results indicated that attention, satisfaction, affective enjoyment, and perceived usefulness were significant determinants for the behavioral intention to play IL games. However, relevance, confidence, cognitive enjoyment, and behavioral enjoyment were not found to predict their behavioral intention.

The authors did not consider other factors in the hypotheses, such as the mediating effects of enjoyment on behavioral intention, and the influence of students’ individual characters such as learning styles or personalities on their behavioral intention of using DGBL. Further, the IL game used in the study, Library Escape, may reduce generalizability of the results. The study used self-reported attitudinal data from survey questionnaires, while behavioral data were not considered.

The results showed that pedagogical features, enjoyment factors, and perceived usefulness remain critical in the uptake of IL games by students. Further, the study demonstrated that instead of behavioral or cognitive dimensions of enjoyment, players are more concerned with affective enjoyment. Hence, developing DGBL with affective features should be pursued.

By taking into consideration both pedagogical and gameplay characteristics of DGBL to explain students’ acceptance of IL games, this study integrates and extends previous studies in the context of IL games. Additionally, instead of using perceived enjoyment as a single dimensional construct, this study adopted a multifaceted, more nuanced perspective on the perceived enjoyment of DGBL.

The Burma/Myanmar naming controversy on Wikipedia stands as an exemplary debate at least in terms of the politeness and civility of discourse. It was also one of the longer running debates on Wikipedia beginning almost at the same time as the creation of the article in 2003. But this debate has other lessons for those interested in one of the world’s key pieces of information infrastructure. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The author’s approach to the study of the Wikipedia talk pages devoted to the Burma/Myanmar naming controversy is qualitative in nature and explores the debate over sources through textual analysis.

Editors brought to their work a number of underlying assumptions including the primacy of the nation-state and the nature of a “true” encyclopedia. These were combined with a particular interpretation of neutral point of view (NPOV) policy that unnecessarily prolonged the debate and, more importantly, would have the effect, if widely adopted, of reducing Wikipedia’s potential to include multiple perspectives on any particular topic.

The study clearly shows how editors tend to uncritically reproduce the dominant assumptions of their societies. When combined with positivist readings of NPOV policy, this has grave implications for Wikipedia’s potential to open up representation to a wider set of knowledge producers and perspectives. Much of this potential cannot be realized if the assumptions of editors, especially their flawed understanding of NPOV, cannot be challenged effectively.

In this study, the authors look at the case of Ferdinand Marcos, President of the Philippines between 1965 and 1986. Documenting the life and career of Marcos on Wikipedia provides an excellent example of the pitfalls confronting those seeking to address disinformation without first reflecting deeply on the reasons why people subscribe to views deemed outlandish by the intellectual or cultural mainstream.

The authors sampled the version of the Marcos article on Wikipedia as it existed after the first edit of each year since its inception (2002). This resulted in 22 texts for analysis. Content and thematic analyses were conducted on these texts as well as on the entire body of talk page comments for the article.

The authors' work suggests that the basic elements of responsible encyclopedic writing have prevailed in the case of Wikipedia's biography of Marcos. However, this is not an unalloyed victory, as issues of polarization remain unaddressed.

Underlying revisionist or distorted claims about Ferdinand Marcos (and other controversial topics) lie very real grievances that give these claims traction for many people. Hence, it is not enough to “just present the facts” to readers. Rather, the authors argue that what is needed is a synthesis of positions that would allow for common ground to be found between them. This could be done in the case of Wikipedia by cultivating editors who are capable and willing to engage with the subject literature in a deeper and richer fashion.

Given Wikipedia’s size and importance to the world’s information infrastructure, it can be forgotten that there exists under the same Wikimedia Foundation umbrella, a number of other volunteer wikis producing information on a variety of topics and subjects. Little research has been conducted on these offshoots. In this article I examine one of the earliest of these efforts, Wikivoyage, a free wiki-based travel guidebook.

I examine the content of Wikivoyage’s articles on the temples of Angkor, Siem Reap (the tourist gateway to the temples), the introductory page for the country of Cambodia as a whole and a sample of regional Cambodian entries. Textual and discourse analysis is the foundation of this work.

The findings suggest that although Wikivoyage is not currently an exemplar of alternative tourism discourses, it certainly has potential. But that potential can only be realized if those interested in contributing to the site alternative perspectives and discourses take up the task in a sensitive manner and in accordance with the developing editing culture.

While conceding that Wikivoyage is currently unlikely to monopolize the guidebook market anytime soon, it is still important to study this social phenomenon both for its own intrinsic interest and to assess its potential for a more enlightened and transformative tourism.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-03-2020-0104

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the value of French School Regulation theory for questions of relevance to researchers and practitioners working in the field of information policy in general and public librarianship in particular.

The paper is divided into two parts. Part one outlines Regulation theory's twin analytic tools of Fordism and post‐Fordism and its value for questions about the evolution of the public library. Part two provides an example of the approach's explanatory potential when applied to a series of public library planning documents produced by the Government of Ontario, Canada from the 1950s.

An interpretation of the evolution of the identity of the library user from patron to customer to information producer‐consumer is proposed at the intersection of the neoliberal state's austerity in social spending, the ubiquity of the new information and communication technologies, and fundamental changes in libraries as sites of waged‐work.

The research facilitates the development of a political economy of the contemporary public library of potential value to the international public library community. Also, conceiving of the public library as first and foremost a site of productive work forces one to re‐engage with the meaning of shifting relations between the library user and the institution on working conditions.

The applicability of a relatively under‐utilized theoretical framework is modelled that enables one to ask new questions of relevance to the field of library and information science.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of the National Library of Singapore in the life of Singaporeans.

The paper uses historical research. McMillan and Chavis’ theory of sense of community is adopted as the analytical framework to delineate the role of the National Library of Singapore.

The paper finds that the National Library of Singapore plays an important role in fostering a sense of community among Singaporeans. The transformation of the library to a truly public institution in 1950s effectively enlarged its boundaries. Upon joining the community of the library, local Singaporeans underwent a bidirectional process of influencing and being influenced. The library made strenuous efforts to meet the needs of Singaporeans in myriad ways, resulting in reinforcement of the sense of community among Singaporeans. A shared emotional connection in the community was engendered as a result of the frequent contact and high-quality interaction.

While being influenced by various social and cultural frameworks under which it operates, the library actively takes part in and influences the society. The study of the library in the life of the users via the lens of sense of community provides a perspective to further understand the potential and power of libraries and how libraries can positively contribute to the society at large.

The purpose of this paper is to use selected discussions appearing on the talk pages of the Wikipedia entry on the Vietnam War to shed light on how the wider epistemological context of this online encyclopaedia affects the nature of debate about sources and subsequently how this knowledge could be used to improve information literacy instruction.

My broad approach to the study of the Wikipedia talk pages on the Vietnam War is qualitative in nature and explores the debate over sources through a textual analysis.

Although much of the debate over sources is conducted without acrimony, the level of analysis one finds in the talk pages is rather shallow while the attention of individual contributors is not overly concentrated.

There have been few studies of individual Wikipedia entries and their talk pages, rather the focus of most of the literature has been on a broad overview of the entire encyclopaedia or a concentration on a set of entries for a particular topic area.