Wikipedia talk:School and university projects/Open Source Culture
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
As a collaborative and open publishing system, Wikipedia depends on the good will of those who participate. Wikipedia is a big project with lots of people working on it, and a set of standards and practices have evolved. It is very important that we understand these standards and practices so that we can contribute productively to the greater project.
One of the key questions we need to ask from the start is: "What belongs in Wikipedia?"
Two good starting points for answering this question are:
Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not
and
From these documents we learn that "Wikipedia is not the place for original research," and that "a wikipedia entry counts as research if it proposes ideas" or "introduces neologisms."
So we must ask ourselves if Wikipedia is in fact the right place for our project on Open Source Culture. Are we doing original research? Is open source culture a neologism?
I googled "open source culture," and came up with several independent references, including this one in the Wikipedia entry for the open source movement:
and this one:
http://fusionanomaly.net/opensourceculture.html
So it is pretty clear to me that open source culture is not a neologism. Is it original research? It is in part, but primarily what we are doing is synthesizing and, yes, recombining existing research and thinking about free and open source software, copyright and fair use, appropriation art, etc.
