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.
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