Joseph M. Reagle Jr.

Last updated

Joseph M. Reagle Jr.
09-1325-joseph (cropped).jpg
Reagle in 2019
Born
Joseph Michael Reagle Jr.

1972 (age 5152) [1]
NationalityAmerican
Education University of Maryland, Baltimore County (BS)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MS)
New York University (PhD)
Occupation(s)Professor, writer
Years active1996–present
Known forInternet studies
Notable work Good Faith Collaboration (2010)
Awards TR35 (2002) [2]
Scientific career
Institutions Northeastern University
Thesis In good faith: Wikipedia collaboration and the pursuit of the universal encyclopedia  (2008)
Doctoral advisor Helen Nissenbaum
Website reagle.org/joseph/ OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. (born 1972 [1] ) is an American academic and writer focused on digital technology and culture, including Wikipedia, online comments, geek feminism, and life hacking. [3] He is an associate professor of communication studies at Northeastern University. [4] He was an early member of the World Wide Web Consortium, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, [5] and in 1998 and 2010 he was a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. [6]

Contents

Education

Reagle received an undergraduate degree in computer science and a minor in history from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He then enrolled in the Technology Policy Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and wrote a masters thesis on trust and cryptographic financial instruments. [7] He returned to MIT as a research engineer, and also served as a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. [5] [6] He returned to schooling at New York University, where he taught, [8] and earned a PhD in 2008 with a thesis about the history and collaborative culture of Wikipedia, [9] supervised by Helen Nissenbaum.

Career and research

Reagle in 2008 Joseph Reagle Portrait.jpg
Reagle in 2008

Reagle was a member of the World Wide Web Consortium from 1996 to 2003. [5] There he worked on issues such as intellectual property and privacy. [5] [10]

In 2002, he was listed as one of MIT Technology Review's TR35, a list of the world's top innovators under the age of 35. [2]

In 2010, he reconstructed the first ten thousand contributions to Wikipedia from a previously lost data dump as a simple website. [11] [12] According to Reagle, the early years of Wikipedia involved instances of antisemitic misconduct by Wikipedia contributors. Reagle highlights a broader 2005 episode when neo-Nazis apparently mobilized to preserve an article on "Jewish ethnocentrism," based on the writings of antisemitic professor Kevin MacDonald. [13]

In 2011, Reagle published a journal article with Lauren Rhue that examined gender bias in Wikipedia, using gendered pronouns to detect articles about women and comparing and contrasting their findings against female coverage in other encyclopedias. [14] [15] The article concluded "that Wikipedia provides better coverage and longer articles, that Wikipedia typically has more articles on women than Britannica in absolute terms, but Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than articles on men relative to Britannica". [15]

Reagle is a supporter of open access [16] and all of his books are available online. [17]

Selected publications

Books

Articles

About Wikipedia

About culture

Policy and technical specifications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MeatballWiki</span> Wiki dedicated to online communities

MeatballWiki is a wiki dedicated to online communities, network culture, and hypermedia. Containing a record of experience on running wikis, it is intended for "discussion about wiki philosophy, wiki culture, instructions and observations."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">World Wide Web Consortium</span> Main international standards organization for the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web. As of 5 March 2023, W3C had 462 members. W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a method to describe and exchange graph data. It was originally designed as a data model for metadata by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It provides a variety of syntax notations and data serialization formats, of which the most widely used is Turtle.

Interpedia was one of the first-proposed online encyclopedia which would allow anyone to contribute by writing articles and submitting them to the central catalogue of all Interpedia pages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benjamin Mako Hill</span> Debian hacker, intellectual property researcher, activist and author

Benjamin Mako Hill is a free software activist, hacker, author, and professor. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects as well as the co-author of three technical manuals on the subject, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible, The Official Ubuntu Server Book, and The Official Ubuntu Book.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HTML5</span> Fifth and previous version of HyperText Markup Language

HTML5 is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation. The current specification is known as the HTML Living Standard. It is maintained by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), a consortium of the major browser vendors.

"Ignore all rules" (IAR) is a policy used on Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. The English Wikipedia policy reads: "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." [emphasis in original]. The rule was proposed by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger to encourage editors to add information without focusing excessively on formatting, though Sanger later criticized the rule's effects on the community.

<i>Good Faith Collaboration</i> 2010 book by Joseph Michael Reagle

Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia is a 2010 book by Joseph M. Reagle Jr. that deals with the topic of Wikipedia and the Wikipedia community. The book was first published on August 27, 2010, through the MIT Press and has a foreword by Lawrence Lessig. The book is an ethnographic study of the history of Wikipedia, its real life and theoretical precursors, and its culture including its consensus and collaborative practices.

WebRTC is a free and open-source project providing web browsers and mobile applications with real-time communication (RTC) via application programming interfaces (APIs). It allows audio and video communication and streaming to work inside web pages by allowing direct peer-to-peer communication, eliminating the need to install plugins or download native apps.

This is a list of books about Wikipedia or for which Wikipedia is a major subject.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julien Cain</span> French librarian

Julien Cain was the general administrator of the Bibliothèque nationale de France before the Occupation of France by Nazi Germany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gender bias on Wikipedia</span> Gender gap problem in Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects

Gender bias on Wikipedia includes various gender-related disparities on Wikipedia, particularly the overrepresentation of men among both volunteer contributors and article subjects, as well as lesser coverage of and topics primarily of interest to women.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Racial bias on Wikipedia</span> Bias on Wikipedia

The English Wikipedia has been criticized for having a systemic racial bias in its coverage. This bias partially stems from an under-representation of people of color within its volunteer editor base. In "Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past," it is noted that article completeness and coverage is dependent on the interests of Wikipedians, not necessarily on the subject matter itself. The past president of Wikimedia D.C., James Hare, asserted that "a lot of [Black American history] is left out" of Wikipedia, due to articles predominately being written by white editors. Articles about African topics that do exist are, according to some, largely edited by editors from Europe and North America and thus, they only reflect their knowledge and their consumption of media, which "tend to perpetuate a negative image" of Africa. Maira Liriano of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has argued that the lack of information regarding Black history on Wikipedia "makes it seem like it's not important."

<i>Reading the Comments</i> 2015 book by Joseph Michael Reagle Jr.

Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web is a 2015 non-fiction book by Northeastern University professor Joseph M. Reagle Jr. The book was first published on April 24, 2015 through MIT Press and deals with the subject of Internet comments in locations like YouTube, Amazon, and forums.

The Fembot Collective is an international collective of feminist media activists, artists, producers, and scholars that publishes the academic journal Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. Fembot has been a catalyst for multiple large scale feminist digital projects, providing the digital and social infrastructure for FemTechNet, publishing the podcast series Books Aren't Dead, and hosting collaborative hack-a-thons and Wikipedia edit-a-thons with Ms. magazine. Although having been funded and supported by multiple institutions including School of Journalism and Communication and the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon., Fembot is concentrated in the University of Maryland currently.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Predictions of the end of Wikipedia</span> Theories that Wikipedia will break down or become obsolete

Various observers have predicted the end of Wikipedia since it rose to prominence, with potential pitfalls from lack of quality-control or inconsistencies among contributors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">María Sefidari</span> Spanish specialist in digital culture, chair of Wikimedia Foundation Board

María Sefidari Huici is a Wikipedian who was the chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees from July 2018 until June 2021, having been re-elected to the position in August 2019. Sefidari was named a Techweek "Women's Leadership Fellow" in 2014. In 2018, an essay she wrote about the upcoming European copyright reform was widely covered, including by TechCrunch and Boing Boing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thing Description</span>

The Thing Description (TD) (or W3C WoT Thing Description (TD)) is a royalty-free, open information model with a JSON based representation format for the Internet of Things (IoT). A TD provides a unified way to describe the capabilities of an IoT device or service with its offered data model and functions, protocol usage, and further metadata. Using Thing Descriptions help reduce the complexity of integrating IoT devices and their capabilities into IoT applications.

In Wikipedia and similar wikis, an edit count is a record of the number of edits performed by a certain editor, or by all editors on a particular page. An edit, in this context, is an individually recorded change to the content of a page. Within Wikimedia projects, a number of tools exist to determine and compare edit counts, resulting in their usage for various purposes, with both positive and negative effects.

<i>Wikipedia @ 20</i> Book of essays about Wikipedia

Wikipedia @ 20 is a book of essays about Wikipedia published by the MIT Press in late 2020, marking 20 years since the creation of Wikipedia. It was edited by academic and author Joseph M. Reagle Jr. and social researcher Jackie Koerner. Contributions came from 34 other Wikipedians, Wikimedians, academics, researchers, journalists, librarians, artists and others, reflecting on particular histories and future themes in Wikipedia discussions.

References

  1. 1 2 VIAF   106756706
  2. 1 2 "Joseph Reagle, 29". Technology Review . Archived from the original on 20 May 2020. Retrieved 11 July 2015.
  3. Joseph M. Reagle Jr.'s publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required); Joseph M. Reagle Jr. publications indexed by Google Scholar
  4. "Joseph Reagle". camd.northeastern.edu. Retrieved 23 June 2020.
  5. 1 2 3 4 "Joseph's W3 Page". www.w3.org. Archived from the original on 14 February 1998. Retrieved 2 August 2020. Reagle's "papers" page on the W3C website indicates that he had co-authored a paper there in 1996: "Joseph's W3 Page [papers]". www.w3.org. Retrieved 2 August 2020. An archived message from January 2004 indicates that Reagle had left the W3C by that date: "Re: Hi from Joseph Reagle on 2004-01-19 (w3c-translators@w3.org from January to March 2004)". lists.w3.org. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  6. 1 2 "Joseph Reagle | Berkman Klein Center". cyber.harvard.edu. 24 March 2020. Retrieved 23 June 2020.
  7. Reagle, Joseph (1996). Trust in a cryptographic economy and digital security deposits: Protocols and policies (MS thesis). Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. hdl:1721.1/11016.
  8. "Faculty Update for 2008–2009" (PDF). Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University. 2008. Retrieved 23 June 2020.
  9. Reagle Jr., Joseph Michael (2008). In good faith: Wikipedia collaboration and the pursuit of the universal encyclopedia (PhD thesis). New York: New York University. OCLC   479700253.
  10. Reagle, Joseph (6 January 2003). "New W3C Software License: Please update OSI page from Joseph Reagle on 2003-01-06 (www-archive@w3.org from January 2003)". lists.w3.org. Retrieved 1 May 2020.
  11. Doctorow, Cory (18 December 2010). "Wikipedia's first 10,000 edits". Boing Boing . Retrieved 23 June 2020.
  12. Reagle, Joseph (16 December 2010). "Wikipedia 10K redux". reagle.org. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  13. Reagle, Joseph M. (2012). Good faith collaboration: the culture of Wikipedia. History and Foundations of Information Science. Cambridge, Mass. London: MIT Press. ISBN   978-0-262-01447-2.
  14. Matias, J. Nathan (21 November 2014). "How to Ethically and Responsibly Identify Gender in Large Datasets". PBS MediaShift . Retrieved 11 July 2015.
  15. 1 2 Reagle, Joseph; Rhue, Lauren (2011). "Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica". International Journal of Communication . 5.
  16. Corbett, Hillary (25 October 2011). "Open Access Week panel: "Wikipedia: Friend or Foe?" – Wednesday at 1:30". librarynews.northeastern.edu. Retrieved 24 July 2020.
  17. Dunn, Katharine (28 November 2018). "The MIT Press to launch print and Open Access book series with support from the MIT libraries". libraries.mit.edu. Retrieved 24 July 2020.
  18. Reviews of Good Faith Collaboration :
  19. Reviews of Reading the Comments :
  20. Reviews of Hacking Life: