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Experiencing Wikipedia

In this post I´m blogging about my experiences on contributing my first Wikipedia article.

For the University Seminar on `Constructing Knowledge in the Digital Age: Wikipedia´s Contribution to the Humanities´ I have written a WP article about the dystopian short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut in German language which is named Harrison Bergeron (Kurzgeschichte) on Wikipedia. The student´s task for the seminar was to create a complete new article or to complement an already existing article that deals somehow with topics of literature or social sciences. I´ve chosen to create a WP article about the short story because I read it recently and was fascinated on how Vonnegut displays the theme of totalitarianism, and the manipulation of society by a fictional government. Besides that there already existed articles about `Harrison Bergeron´ in English, French, Spanish and Russian but not in German. So this theme fitted perfectly to the assignment – I was about to create a WP article about a literary work with social and political background which wasn´t existing yet in my mother language. Continue reading “Experiencing Wikipedia”

Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four) / Großer Bruder – comparison of the German and the English Wikipedia article

Subject

This work analyzes the differences of German and English Wikipedia articles of the same theme.

In concrete terms this paper deals with the comparison of the German Wikipedia article Großer Bruder and the English Article Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four).

Both articles are based on the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. In this novel the Big Brother is a fictional character in the role of the enigmatic dictator of the surveillance state created in the story. Continue reading “Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four) / Großer Bruder – comparison of the German and the English Wikipedia article”