Symposium ‘Reading Wikipedia’

This year, the Erasmus Prize++The Erasmus PrizeThe Erasmus Prize is an annual prize awarded by the board of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation to individuals or institutions that have made exceptional contributions to culture, society, or social science in Europe and the rest of the world. Read more will be awarded to Wikipedia for promoting the dissemination of knowledge through a comprehensive and universally accessible encyclopedia. To honour this occasion, a symposium is organised.

The symposium will discuss questions like: Can Wikipedia meet the encyclopedic urge? Why is it that material that is produced by public broadcasters with public funding cannot be used by the public to illustrate and enrich Wikipedia articles?

And how should Wikipedia be employed as a cultural reference work as well as controversy machine, pointing up the larger question of how to use Wikipedia for social research?

The limits of the open model

Stichting Praemium Erasmianum, the organizers of the Erasmus prize, have asked Paul Keller to curate one of the three sessions of the symposium. The session ‘Wikipedia as a memory institution – the limits of the open model’ will explore the relationship between the free culture repository build by Wikimedia and existing systems of public knowledge production.

You are most welcome to attend the symposium. Participation is free, but registration is required. You can register by submitting this online form.

More information

Read more about the programme of the symposium here.

• Betrokken KL'ers
• Paul Keller pk@kl.nl