It's not something I've said many words about  (there's a mention of it, sort of, here, and there may be something about it here) on this blog before now, but I have this idea that I'm going to do research about Wikipedia. Something sociolinguistic/pragmatic/text...y. If I get a job in Gent, Belgium, which I've applied for (quite possible though still far from sure, though I'll probably know more in a few days), that is what I would be doing when I would not be teaching Swedish as a foreign language and checking the language in various documents. Also, all of this autumn I've been meaning to start on an article for some sort of academic publication. My teacher in a course on "Text Theory and Text Analysis", Per Holmberg, actually suggested that this might be a good idea after I'd turned in my analysis of Swedish Wikipedia's article on "Göteborgskravallerna" ("the Gothenburg Riots", see also Protests during the EU summit in Gothenburg 2001 on English Wikipedia). He also offered me some help, but unfortunately it turned out that he got busier with other things than he had thought he would be and couldn't spare as much of his time as he had hoped. I'm still very grateful to Per for being a great teacher on "the text course", for encouraging me to try to publish something and that help with that he has actually given me both before and after getting "actually too busy", and for introducing me to Erik Boström, a librarian and historian of ideas who is actually already doing interesting wiki-related research at the Department of Swedish Language here in Gothenburg. Erik has been very helpful and always has very interesting things to say, and it would probably have been smart to try to have closer contact with him than we've had.

 

Anyhow... There's no article thus far. There's the original analysis of the article on the "Gothenburg riots", a research plan originally written when I applied for a job in Linköping but which I also sent to Gent, and some methodology notes that were cut out of the final version of that document (keyword is notes, very elliptical). All in Swedish. Those are the things I've put on the web because I thought/hoped some people, primarily Wikipedians, might be interested. And then there's my little ongoing project on my user page on Swedish Wikipedia, a Wikipedia bibliography. And 1, 2, 3 little recommendations on this blog about things to read for fun on English Wikipedia. And now this post, meant to be my return to working actively on getting something together for publication... which I guess it can still be, even though I think I'll let this little summary of what I've done so far be enough this week save actually discussing Wikipedia and wikis, what kind of research one might want to do on them and so on, to another week. Not on the web for now are the things I cut out from the "riot analysis". (It may be surprising to those who have seen how long that is that things have been cut from it, but that is the case.) And that's about it with things I've written about wikis and Wikipedia - so far. As should already be apparent, I hope to be returning to the subject shortly.

Now to finish with a little list of non-writing things that I've done related to the Wikipedia thing: Applied for two jobs - one of which I may still get - where I've hoped to be allowed to do my Wikipedia research; read stuff, much of which is listed in the Wikipedia bibliography linked to above; been to this conference and this one; done a wee bit of editing on Wikipedia and also on Wiktionary while keeping up some illusion that it's "work"... sort of. Right?