Kpjas here and now

On May 12, 2007 Marija Šerifović won The Eurovision Song Contest with a song called Molitva (Prayer in English, the title of the English version is Destiny).

 This is only the second time a contestant from the former Yugoslavia won the Contest (the first was a Yugoslav band called Riva winning in 1989). Interestingly Molitva won despite it is sung in Serbian and not in English which has become a lingua franca of the music industry.

Molitva is a really great song and it rightly won but to some it may come as a  surprise that such a small country was victorious this year.

Audiences all over the world are largely unaware of the great potential of pop music from the Balkan countries of south-eastern Europe. This is real music that is the fruit of true creativity that comes from the heart. It’s not soulless  product of money hungry show biz profiteers sung by manufactured pop idols that we hear all around every day. It’s real, it’s powerful, it’s heart-wrenching…

The Balkans is full of great artists and one of my recent favourites is a band called Neverne Bebe (Unfaithful Sweethearts) . Check out their tremendous tunes on youtube.com

… online collaboration Wikipedia-style 

In spite of widespread criticisms of problematic credibility of Wikipedia content,  the online encyclopedia is sometimes praised for coverage of dramatic events of global interest like:

• The Indian Ocean earthquake in 2004
• The terrorist bombings in 2005 in London
• The Virginia Tech massacre

The editing process happening practically simultaneously (in real time) and at a frantic pace managed to create well-researched, reliable articles in a relatively short time, short enough not to lose its topical relevance of a good news source.  When an event or a disaster of massive global interest strikes Wikipedia seems to be suprisingly a dependable  (sometimes the best) news source on the net.

This remarkable success of online collaborative journalism (?) was noted by both by blogosphere and the mainstream media (NYT for example). It seems that this is a unique and unparalleled phenomenon.

It might be interesting, I think, to study these examples of the Wikipedia Explosive Editing Phenomenon (WEEP, what an acronym, heh) and compare with a representative sample of other Wikipedia articles.

 Maybe some insightful conclusions might be drawn from this study with implications for Wiki(pedia) and other online grassroots journalism projects.
 

 See also:  Assessing the value of cooperation in Wikipedia by HP Labs researchers Dennis M. Wilkinson and Bernardo A. Huberman

References:

•  Latest on Virginia Tech, from Wikipedia from NYT
• Short note on on  Wikipedia coverage Sun-sentinel.com
  
• The crowd reports on Virginia Tech
• Wikipedia proved reliable in tragedy News Observer
• Old media grounded Va. Tech story The Denver Post

Richard Dawkins‘ somewhat controversial response to critique.

The 2007 Annual Wikimedia Poland Conference is currently under way in Białowieza in northern Poland.

The conference is scheduled for 3 days  (May 1-3, 2007) and is going to gather large crowds of Wikipedians/Wikimedians as well as several prominent authors, scientists and other lecturers who will host a wide range of interesting and thought-provoking presentations.

I hope the proceedings of the Conference is going to be published some time in future because I could not attend the event. 

It may seem a little odd that only yesterday I discovered this interview called Wikipedia in Poland with Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia (see more about him in his Wikipedia entry and personal userpage.