(This is the sixth installment in a series of updates from the WikiHistories summer research fellows, who will be studying the virtual community history of different Wikipedia editing communities.)

During my trip in Turkey, I’ve met with many interesting Vikipedians who truly believe in the importance of their contribution to Vikipedi and enjoy the many hours they spend in front of their computers editing the encyclopedia. It has been a highly remarkable experience to meet so many users with a highly successful educational background and with great ambition for their futures. Most Vikipedians are in different stages of their high school and college educations and see Vikipedi as an important part of their academic growth, as well as a significant part of their social life. This was one of the reasons why many of them repeatedly expressed interest in organizing regular meetings. But, they are also interested in organizing international meetings such as Wikimania.

This year, Vikipedians worked really hard for their Wikimania 2012 campaign. But they were not able to find a sponsor for the event and as a result did not have a chance to organize a comprehensive campaign. Although Vikipedi lost the opportunity to host the conference for the next year, there is new hope for Wikimania 2013. Another event that really excites the community is an upcoming conference on new media in Istanbul, New Media Order, where Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has been invited to be a keynote speaker along with Julian Assange, the co-founder of Wikileaks.org. In addition to an immense synergy that these two prominent free-information advocates might bring, the conference also has a great potential to be an important venue to talk about Internet freedom in Turkey.

Thousands of Turks gathered in some 40 cities and towns around the country on Sunday, May 15th, to join marches organized against Internet censorship

This issue has recently garnered a great deal of attention in the context of the imminent threat of the recently proposed Internet ban by the Turkish government, aimed at controlling access to “harmful content.” Last May, thousands of people protested the Internet ban proposal on the streets of major cities across the country by pointing out that the filtering system is compulsory, based on a very arbitrary criteria and too comprehensive. However, there has not been any significant progress in talks with the agency that would be in charge of the application of this new blanket filtering mechanism by 22 August, 2011.

In the light of these recent debates, the New Media Order conference might serve as a platform for a serious discussion by including a larger group of people who have stakes in the free access to information on the Internet. During my interactions with the members of the Vikipedi community I have noticed a great sensibility about the prospects of these restrictions. However, in order to be able to participate in these kinds of vital debates, Vikipedi users think that a Wikimedia Turkey office would be highly useful, which seems to be the next big step for the community.

“We don’t think they would ever filter contents of Vikipedi, but who knows, maybe we would be the first to go, because Vikipedi has already seen many threats, and in some occasions we even had to delete revision histories” said one Vikipedi user, who prefers to remain anonymous. However, these possibilities most of the time translate themselves into a concerted awareness of Vikipedi’s responsibility that further energizes the community,  bringing more hope for saving free information in Turkey.

Ayhan Aytes

PhD Candidate

Communication and Cognitive Science

University of California San Diego

(This is the third installment in a series of updates from the WikiHistories summer research fellows, who will be studying the virtual community history of different Wikipedia editing communities)

I started working with the Turkish language Wikipedia community (tr.wikipedia.org) as part of the Wikimedia digital community history fellowship in June 2011. During the second week of my research I had a chance to attend a meeting organized by Wikipedians in Istanbul. The meeting was highly helpful in identifying the major issues that Turkish Wikipedia (Vikipedi) has been dealing with. Although the meeting had a significant lack in terms of female participation, the opposite is the case for the actual contributions to the online encyclopedia. This point was also confirmed by one of the female editors of Vikipedi as she mentioned several other female editors who have been significant contributors.

One of the major issues that the community faces is the low retention rate of the new users. In several occasions this is explained by uncompromised application of community policies against vandalism.  However some users have suggested that this attitude needs to change in order to provide a more flexible environment for the new users who are more likely to make policy mistakes in editing articles.

Turkish language community seems to have close ties with the Azeri language community (az.wikipedia.org) both in terms of collaboration and competition. The close similarity of these two languages must be a big factor for this close interaction, however the application of policies in certain issues seems to have a wide gap. Turkish Wikipedia is the 20^th language community in the number of articles below Hungarian and above Indonesian. There has been projects to increase the number of articles in Vikipedi. Utilizing bots for starting new articles has been the subject of a long debate which recently been resolved by the acceptance of a new set of criteria. This change has had a significant boost in the number of articles.

Vikipedi community has been recently energized with the introduction of a new project that focuses on the description of small cities, villages and provinces. This project attracted new group of people who are primarily interested in promoting their hometowns by contributing to the related Vikipedi articles.

During the meeting there were also interesting discussions about the way the new users are welcomed. Particularly, welcoming new users with impersonal greeting templates were criticized and alternatives were discussed. While, novel Vikipedians emphasized the need for more visual tools such as videos and interactive applications for introductions, editors have pointed out the immense workload required for preparation of these materials.

Vikipedi currently ranks 17^th among the most visited Turkish websites. It is frequently cited as a reliable source in Turkish media and praised for its contribution to the digital content production in Turkish language. However the alternative sites have also emerged mostly created by people who left Wikipedia due to various conflicts such as Ansiklopedika.org, that announces its motto as “protect the knowledge”. Another site Eksisozluk, has been a cultural phenomenon since 1999 as it enables the users to voice opinions in the form of a dictionary entry but with a satirical manner on a wide range of topics including current events, celebrities, politicians or mundane details of daily life in Turkey. This stark contrast between the factual information and subjective perspective might be the key to understanding the kinds of people (or virtual personas) Wikipedia and Eksisozluk might attract.

I have continued my interaction with the individual users of Wikipedia, mostly focusing on their personal histories and how their view has evolved about the collaborative culture of Wikipedia. These accounts often mention large scale changes in the community after crises typically involving a controversial topic, person or an event, as reference points. I will continue to work with the Turkish community combining these individual accounts with the large scale changes on the background that have been shaping their journey with Vikipedi.

Ayhan Aytes

PhD Candidate

Communication and Cognitive Science

University of California San Diego