We Wrote a Wikipedia Article

During the last few weeks, my fellow students and I worked together as a class to write a Wikipedia article about Public Sphere Writing. This project involved the study of ethics, fallibility, and understanding the politics and etiquette of creating an article in an online environment. This presented the challenge of collaborative editing and representing our concept as thoroughly as possible.

The foundational principles of Zittrain’s “The Lessons in Wikipedia” and Lazere’s “Viewpoint, Bias, and Fairness: From Cocksure Ignorance to Thoughtful Uncertainty.” had the biggest influence on my work for this project. My group of three was designated to write the section titled Communities and Networks. We broke that section down into Citizen Criticism, Citizen Activism, Citizen Journalist, and Public Deliberation. I worked on the Citizen journalism section and based the information I included on the text “Thinking about Citizen Journalism: Perspectives on Participatory News Production at Community Newspapers” by Lewis, Kaufhold, and Lasorsa and Chapter 4 of Rettburg’s Blogging. I read through my sources, considered the overarching theme of each piece, and made sure I understood it in relation to Public Sphere Writing. I also pulled out key excerpts directly discussing citizen journalism and made a point to include them in our article. I summarized and synthesized my source texts to create a kind of conversation and then made sure to remove any bias or fallacious statements. Pulling apart these texts in order to clearly, concisely, and correctly define citizen journalism was difficult, but with the combination of Wikipedia’s strict guidelines and peer review workshops in class, I was able to develop a clear understanding of what was expected of me as a Wikipedia writer and apply those expectations to the best of my ability.

This assignment also called me to assist other sections in developing content and meeting standards. I was assigned to edit the “Influences” section of our article. The main issues of this section included lack of clarity, lack of information, unclear relations and explanations, and the use of blanket terms. For example one sentence was: “Queer Theory exists within feminist theory.” and included no precursor and no further information. I think a lot of groups struggled with the difficulty of relaying the information in a way that makes sense to an unfamiliar audience since what makes sense to fellow group members in not likely to make as much sense to the average reader. Being explicit enough without oversimplifying concepts was a common challenge.

It was very difficult to edit this article because with so many people working on it there are so many different opinions and writing styles and disagreements about what is appropriate. It was very challenging to create a coherent section between just my group members and I and there were only three of us, so I can imagine the challenge for groups of five or more. One specific instance of this came with editing language and tone, and thus avoiding bias and jargon and aiming for objectivity and neutral point of view.

My individual editing assignment was to edit the language and tone throughout the entire article. This task was definitely a challenge and became frustrating at times because I was torn between changing someone’s words for the sake of consistent tone and not messing with it in case I took away from their intended message. With 25 different writers contributing to this article, consistent tone was a challenge. In my editing, I aimed for each group to use appropriate language and tone at all times rather than completely changing everyone’s work to sound a certain way. It was very hard to write for Wikipedia specifically rather than just the way I think is best. There are certain guidelines everyone must follow but it is still so easy to embed idioms and chatty language without realizing. I tried my best to remove this kind of language and in these situations found it best to just keep the language concise and straightforward. “A large step in the direction of objectivity, then, is learning to avoid applying a double standard toward biases favoring our own side versus those favoring the other” (Lazere 128). Like Zittrain states, “the idea that a “neutral point of view” even exists, and that it can be determined among people who disagree, is an amazingly quaint, perhaps even naïve, notion. Yet is it invoked earnestly and often productively on Wikipedia” (Zittrain 144). Attaining a neutral point of view throughout the article was a challenge and one of the main concerns we faced as a class. Our preparatory work with Wikipedia prior to this assignment, however, proved extremely beneficial to our objectivity. In order to remain neutral and still include a myriad of diverse information, I took Zittrain’s advice regarding Wikipedia writing when he claims that a writer’s goal “should not be to avoid expressing opinions but to express opinions that will impress your readers as educated, unprejudiced, and fair” (129).

The topic we chose gave us the opportunity “participate in the making and remaking of cultural meanings instead of having them foisted upon us” (Zittrain 147). Public Sphere Writing is a relatively new concept, so we had to use our combined knowledge to write one of the first comprehensive articles about it. Since a lot of Public Sphere Writing occurs via the Internet, the fact that this article was written by college-age students who grew up practicing this allowed it to be “made by those closest to the issues” (Zittrain 143). We embedded links to several other wiki articles in our article, thus creating an intertext. I think this is an important distinction in our article that reiterates public-sphere writing and will be acknowledged and appreciated. 

 “The ultimate stage in development is committed relativism, in which students have learned that, in spite of complexity and uncertainty of many truths, judgments of truth and falsity, right and wrong, and moral commitments still need to be made, on the basis of the most complete, diverse knowledge presently available to us” (Lazere 128). We took on this task and were held accountable for the decisions we made. Keeping this in mind helped me write with an understanding of the severity, implications, and rhetorical velocity (a strategic concept of delivery in which a rhetor theorizes the possibilities for the recomposition of a text based on how s/he anticipates how the text might later be used” (Ridolfo and Rife 229)) my work might have.

Overall, I am extremely proud to be a part of this creation and have the upmost respect and admiration for my peers fearlessly taking on such a challenging task. Our finished article is packed with information and every section worked hard to contribute to the whole.

Works Cited

Lazere, Donald. “Viewpoint, Bias, and Fairness: From Cocksure Ignorance to Thoughtful Uncertainty.” In Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy: The Critical Citizen’s Guide to Argumentative Rhetoric. Boulder, CO: Paradigm P, 2005. 125-38. Print.

Ridolfo, Jim and Martine Courant Rife. Rhetorical Velocity and Copyright: A Case Study

Zittrain, Jonathan. “The Lessons of Wikipedia.” The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. New Haven, CT: Yale UP,ne Courant Rife. Rhetorical Velocity and Copyright: A Case Study