As the fifth most visited website on the internet today, the user-generated encyclopaedia Wikipedia has attracted significant attention from researchers based across the academic disciplines. However, this previous work has generally neglected the multilingual aspects of the encyclopaedia, and downplayed the significance of translation within the collaborative processes of content creation that take place within the platform. Consequently, this doctoral thesis has set out to investigate the people and practices involved in the co-production and dissemination of knowledge across linguistic and cultural borders in the context of Wikipedia. By developing an analytical approach that combines narrative theory (Baker 2006) with insights drawn from the work of Henri Lefebvre (1974/1991) and Michel Foucault (1967/1986), I have examined the construction of 27 city-related articles published within the English- and French-language editions of the platform. This analysis has shown that Wikipedia volunteers make abundant use of source materials published in a diversity of languages other than that in which they are writing, and that the creation of these encyclopaedic articles involves a wide range of partly overlapping multilingual activities, a complex combination of translating, re-contextualising, summarising and synthesising. My study has also brought to light the multi-faceted negotiations that occur between the different participants involved in these processes of intersubjective knowledge production. This has drawn attention to Wikipedia as a space of discordant juxtaposition and creative simultaneity, and foregrounded the cacophony of opposing narrative positionings present within each article-focused community of multilingual produsers.

Wikipedia is no longer just another source of knowledge about the world. It is fast becoming a central source, used by other powerful knowledge brokers like Google and Bing to offer authoritative answers to search queries about people, places and things and as information infrastructure for a growing number of Web applications and services. Researchers have found that Wikipedia offers a skewed representation of the world that favours some groups at the expense of others so that representations on the platform have repercussions for the subjects of those representations beyond Wikipedia's domain. It becomes critical in this context to understand how exactly Wikipedia's representations come about, what practices give rise to them and what socio-technical arrangements lead to their expression. This ethnographic study of Wikipedia explores the values, principles and practices that guide what knowledge Wikipedia represents. It follows the foundational principles of Wikipedia in its identity both as an encyclopaedia and a product of the free and open source software and internet freedom rhetoric of the early 2000s. Two case studies are analysed against the backdrop of this ideology, illustrating how different sets of actors battle to extend or reject the boundaries of Wikipedia, and in doing so, affect who are defined as the experts, subjects and revolutionaries of the knowledge that is taken up. The findings of this thesis indicate that Wikipedia's process of decision-making is neither hierarchical nor is it egalitarian; rather, the power to represent on Wikipedia is rhizoid: it happens at the edges rather than in the centre of the network. Instead of everyone having the same power to represent their views on Wikipedia, those who understand how to perform and speak according to Wikipedia's complex technical, symbolic and policy vocabulary tend to prevail over those who possess disciplinary knowledge about the subject being represented. Wikipedians are no amateurs as many would have us believe; nor are they passive collectors of knowledge held in sources; Wikipedians are, instead, active co-creators of knowledge in the form of facts that they support using specially chosen sources. The authority of Wikipedia and Wikipedians is garnered through the performative acts of citation, through the ability of individual editors to construct the traces that represent citation, and through the stabilization and destabilization of facts according to the ideological viewpoints of its editors. In venerating and selecting certain sources among others, Wikipedians also serve to reaffirm traditional centres of authority, while at the same time amplifying new centres of knowledge and denying the authority of knowledge that is not codified in practice. As a result, Wikipedia is becoming the site of new centres of expertise and authoritative knowledge creation, and is signalling a move towards the professionalization of the expertise required to produce factual data in the context of digital networks.

Bibliography: leaf 628-669. / 2 v. (xxiii, 669 leaves, [4] leaves of folded plates) : ill., maps ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dept. of History, University of Adelaide, 1965

The question of how the Internet affects existing geo-cultural or geo-linguistic communities in relation to nation-states has continued to receive attention among academics and policymakers alike. Language-based technologies and services that aggregate, index, and distribute materials online may reshape pre-existing boundaries of the relationship between users and content, for instance with different language versions of user-generated encyclopaedias or different local versions of search engines. By comparing two major Chinese online encyclopaedias, Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia, this thesis investigates whether the Internet overcomes, shifts, or reinforces boundaries among Chinese language users. The Chinese language provides an excellent case for examining the boundary question. While the Internet can potentially connect the largest number of native speakers around the world, the majority (i.e. those from mainland China) face an Internet censorship and filtering regime that may limit this very potential. Modern Chinese history has also complicated the cultural-political boundaries among the regions of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. This thesis compares the conditions and outcomes of their respective editorial processes, content features, and users’ reception. Multiple findings emerge from a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including content analysis, webometrics, and search engine result visibility tests. These methods show that boundaries are drawn in the process of creating, linking, and searching content on the Chinese Internet. Their geolinguistic extent differs, a phenomenon that reflects the cultural-political division between mainland China and the rest of Chinese-speaking world. Both the findings and methods of the thesis have important implications for research and policy for understanding the globalizing regionalization and nationalization effects of the Internet.

Dieses Buch ruft das Genre Kino der (kollektiven) Ängste ins Leben und beschreibt und analysiert dieses Genre anhand beispielhafter Fallstudien nach dem 9/11. Es liefert vielschichtige Filmanalysen zu vier Hollywood-Filmen; Crash (2004), The Brave One (2007), The Company Men (2010) und The Purge: Election Year (2016). Diese Forschung stellt einen Versuch dar, eine abgrenzende Definition dieses Kinos als filmisches (Sub-)Genre zu konzipieren und einen Überblick über die Eigenschaften dieses Kinos zu geben, wobei besonderes Augenmerk auf post-9/11 Filme mit der Angst-Narrativ der inneren Bedrohung gelegt wird. Dieses Genre steht an der Schnittstelle ästhetischer Erkenntnisse, historischer Entwicklungen, kultureller Phänomene und politisch-ideologischer Schattierungen, was die Hybridisierung zu einem der Hauptmerkmale dieser Filmgattung macht. Diese Studie betrachtet das kollektive Angstkino nach dem 9/11 als eine Ansammlung historischer Ängste, von denen einige aus genau dieser Zeit stammen (wie der Patriot Act und die ständigen Alarmstufen Rot), während andere auf frühere Epochen der US-Geschichte zurückgehen (wie die Ankunft der ersten europäischen Siedler in einer unbekannten feindlichen Umgebung, die Hexenjagd in Salem, der Rote Schrecken, die Bürgerrechtsbewegung und die satanische Panik). Anders gesagt, das Buch untersucht die inneren Assoziationen der Filme mit einer Reihe historischer Ängste von der Gründung Amerikas bis zur Gegenwart. Darüber hinaus geht diese Studie den Echos dieser Ängste nach und beleuchtet ihre Ausdrucksformen und ihre Echos in anderen Filmen, literarischen Werken, Genres und Mythen. Obwohl die untersuchten Ängste oft mit relativ spezifischen Problemen verbunden sind (wie Race-Ängste und Kulturkriege, Kriminalitätsängste und Waffenkultur, Wirtschaftsängste und der Finanzcrash sowie politische Ängste und Wahlparanoia), sind sie immer noch überwiegend, nach Ansicht der Autorin, das Produkt eines halben Jahrhunderts neoliberaler Politik. / This book brings 'the cinema of (collective) anxieties' to life as a genre, and it describes and analyzes this genre based on exemplary post-9/11 case studies. Thus, it provides multilayered film analyses of four Hollywood movies; Crash (2004), The Brave One (2007), The Company Men (2010), and The Purge: Election Year (2016). This research constitutes an attempt to conceptualize a demarcating definition of this cinema as a cinematic (sub)genre and to provide an outline of the traits and characteristics of this cinema while paying special attention to the cycle of post-9/11 movies depicting the fear narrative of internal threat. This genre stands at a junction of aesthetic realizations, historical developments, cultural phenomena, and political-ideological shades, which makes hybridization one of the leading features of this cinematic genre. This study approaches the post-9/11 collective anxiety cinema as an accumulation of historical anxieties, some of which stem from this very period (such as the Patriot Act and the constant Red Alerts), while others date back to earlier eras in US history (such as the arrival of the first European settlers in an unknown hostile environment, the Salem Witch Hunt, the Red Scare, the civil rights movement, and the Satanic panic). In other words, the book explores the films' inner associations with bundles of historical anxieties from the inception of America until the current era. Furthermore, this study traces the echoes of these anxieties and highlights their forms of expression and their echoes in other movies, literary works, genres, and myths. Although the examined anxieties are often tied to relatively specific problems (like racial anxieties and culture wars; crime anxieties and gun culture; economic anxieties and the financial crash; political anxiety and election paranoia), they are still largely, in the author's view, the product of half a century of neoliberal policies.