Wikipedia: A Group Effort

When I read Wikipedia pages online while trying to do research for a paper before starting this project, I usually look at them and criticize the small mistakes that I see whether its grammar, sentence structure, the lack of cohesion or just what seems like irrelevant information in the article. It wasn’t until, as a class, we began creating our own Wikipedia article, Public Sphere Writing, that I truly started to understand how much of a process this actually was. Not only is it a process but creating a Wikipedia page isn’t a task that one should try or even could accomplish on their own. It takes a community to make a successful page and luckily Wikipedia has a community that makes it possible.

Creating a Wikipedia page with a large group can have its ups and downs. It is nice to be able to bounce ideas off of each other while we were in the small groups of four but as soon as it gets into the larger group and people start criticizing your work it can be hard to accept. Jonathan Zittrain made a good point in The Lessons of Wikipedia about working in groups; he said, “More generally, order may remain when people see themselves as part of a social system, a group of people-more than utter strangers but less than friends- with some overlap in outlook and goals” (Zittrain 129). It is important to have a group such as our class or the Wikipedia community that has all have the same goal, which is to create a successful Wikipedia page to share with people so they can learn the information that we have found to be important about public sphere writing. Although it can be difficult for people to decide that your work isn’t necessarily relevant in the article, there is a reason for it. It can be hard to see in your own work but when a fresh set of eyes looks at it, it can make a big difference.

The reason it is so important for so many people to work on a Wikipedia page, whether in writing or editing it is so that eventually teachers and professors can agree that it is a valuable source for research. If teachers don’t find it a reliable source, then did the writers and editors really do their jobs right? Carra Hood says in "Editing Out Obscenity: Wikipedia and Writing Pedagogy," A teacher might permit students to cite Wikipedia entries as long as they consult additional resources too, or she might prohibit the use of Wikipedia altogether, directing students to journal articles, university web projects, and other peer reviewed materials. People don’t find Wikipedia to be a reliable source for the most part because anyone can edit them, that’s why it is important that we all do our job to make sure that the articles are well written with relevant information.

After helping to create the Wikipedia article, Public Sphere Writing, I can now see the amount of work that really goes into creating a Wikipedia article. Not only will I have pride in this article but I feel more encouraged now to help fix articles that need some attention still. I want people to look at Wikipedia as a reliable source and for people to understand that a lot of work goes into keeping it running smoothly.

Hood, Carra Leah. "Editing Out Obscenity: Wikipedia and Writing      Pedagogy." Editing Out Obscenity: Wikipedia and Writing       Pedagogy. Web. 4 Dec. 2014.

Zittrain, Jonathan. "The Lessons of Wikipedia." The Future of the       Internet and How to Stop It. Print.

A Newfound Respect for Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a functioning encyclopedia that allows people to gather information from different sources and share it with one another. It’s a community comprised of writers, editors and administrators that all have equal parts; it may not be equal power but they are all necessary components for the Wikipedia community to exist. Jonathan Zittrain explains in Lessons of Wikipedia that “order may remain when people see themselves as part of a social system, a group of people- more than utter strangers but less than utter friends- with some overlap in outlook and goals (129).  Wikipedia is a social system; the common goal is to create a workspace or even a sharing space for people to rely information to each other.

Before I looked at the Wikipedia “help” page on editing and the ”editing” tab on the tutorial page, I had always imagined that Wikipedia was just a free for all and that anyone could edit something just because they wanted to. I realized now that there was a process that Wikipedia uses to try to make the editing process go a little more smoothly. After editing a page there is a place for an “Edit Summary” so the person is able to explain why they did it. The edit summary gives the person that first wrote the article or the entry that is being editing a reason why so they aren’t left in the dark wondering why it wasn’t good enough to begin with. That just explains again how much of a community based encyclopedia Wikipedia is. 

I made a very simple fix to the Bulgarians in Albania article. I just changed some sentence structure to make that part of the article a little more clear to the audience. The following sentences show how simple my changes were. I didn’t even add any words.

Original sentence: Daniel Mоscopolites at the end of the eighteenth century, a Vlach-speaking native priest of Moscopole, compiled a quadrilingual lexicon of Greek, Vlach, Bulgarian and Albanian, with the purpose of helping them to learn Greek.

Edited sentence: At the end of the eighteenth century,Daniel Mоscopolites , a Vlach-speaking native priest of Moscopole, compiled a quadrilingual lexicon of Greek, Vlach, Bulgarian and Albanian, with the purpose of helping them to learn Greek.

When I first realized that people changed things on Wikipedia I thought it only involved changing the information that was available to the reader. I never thought that changing sentence structure would be a reasonable change. Because I previously didn’t understand that Wikipedia had administrators and editors looking out for botched information that people added, I had always assumed it was an unreasonable source to use for papers and projects. Carra Leah Hood explains in Editing out Obscenity: Wikipedia and Writing Pedagogy, that Wikipedia’s “encyclopedia’s usefulness follows directly from its popularity and from the seriousness with which those who administer the site oversee and vet individual entries and provide guidance.” Because Wikipedia is so popular and it is always being revised and new information is always being added/editing, it is a good source to look at because it isn’t static. Administrators keeping tabs on people and editors are making the proper corrections.

As little as it was, and as silly as it seems, I gained a sense of respect for the Wikipedia community after making my first edit and looking into how to make a edit on Wikipedia. I feel as if it is a well managed encyclopedia that is always growing; there may be times when some faulty information is being added to pages but that is generally address quite quickly by editors and administrators since they can see when the pages have been edited and then they can go check them.

The Importance of Cohesion and Structure on Wikipedia

The structure and contents of a Wikipedia article is what determines how successful it is. No one wants to read an article that they cannot understand because it is written poorly. Wikipedia has criteria that should be followed as a checklist to make sure that the information makes sense to readers. It’s important that it is comprehensive, well-researched, stable, neutral and well-written; it should also have a lead that describes what the article will be about, a good understandable structure, some sort of media to show pictures of the topic being discussed, a good length, and most importantly, citations.

To show some of the characteristics, I’ll compare a few articles that may or may not do some of the previously mentioned criteria well. Michelle Citron and Marshall McLuhan’s articles are completely different. To begin, Michelle Citron’s articles has no media that could show what she looks like or what she has done while Marshall McLuhan’s articles has only two pictures. Two pictures are better than none but it still could be better. The visuals help the ethos of the articles and they are an important part of them.  The structure of the table of contents is important too. Citron’s article has a very basic table of contents with no subcategories. One of the categories is just a chart of her filmography and it says Filmography (Partial List) they didn’t even give a full list of it. Saying partial list is like saying that they didn’t want to finish it. Citron’s article on Wikipedia feels very incomplete. It feels as if the writers or writer rushed it just to get it done. The only links it has are to the universities that she attended in her early life, which is quite irrelevant to her career and what she may be known for. The links don’t really help the article or lead to anything that people would associate with her. On the other hand, McLuhan’s article feels more complete and has many links that the readers can follow to another page. When there are many links to other pages it makes the article feel more important, and it helps the reader learn more about the things he has influenced in his life.  His article also many more sources and further reading links that Citron’s does which helps the reader learn more about him and his accomplishments. By giving so many sources we can tell that the ideas put into the article are no plagiarized. In Plagiarism and Promiscuity, Authors and Plagiarisms,  Russel Wiebe describes plagiarism as “a rapidly growing problem in many venues today” (31) Its always assumed that plagiarism is just on homework but it can also happen on major websites like Wikipedia.

It’s interesting to see the differences in Wikipedia articles like Michelle Citron and Marshall McLuhan’s but it is also interesting to see how websites differ in their articles about the same people. Henry Sidgwick’s article on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy differs from Henry Sidgwick’s article on Wikipedia.  The articles are structurally pretty much the same. They both have a table of contents although they differ slightly in contents but they both have categories and subcategories. Wikipedia’s article has a media element with a picture of him, which gives the article a little more credit. Without a picture, the Stanford article seems a little blander and it loses some ethos.  The tone of the articles varies as well. Stanford’s article seems as if the same person wrote it. It flows very well together. Wikipedia’s article seems a little choppier. It makes sense that Wikipedia’s article seems choppier because anyone can edit the articles. As Zittrain discusses in Lessons of Wikipedia, anyone can edit and write articles because they wanted Wikipedia to expand and finally get articles written (134-135). As good of an idea as that is, it is also difficult because then the articles can get choppy and not sound as if they should be a cohesive article if they are not written in a stable and neutral way. With the Stanford article everything seems cohesive and neutral.  There are few differences in the structure but it is very apparent that Stanford seems more scholarly written than Wikipedia.

Another Featured Article on Wikipedia that I chose to look at was Guinea Pig. This article has some strengths and weaknesses. One thing the writers and editors did really well was creating links. There are many links that the readers are able to click which makes more information readily available. Relevant links help to strengthen not only the article on Guinea pigs, but also Wikipedia as a whole so readers can go and learn about other pages that are on the websites as well.  The other thing that the article does well is the table of contents. It is very clear to the reader where to look to find the information that they are looking for. There are many topics and very clear subtopics to look at and choose from.  The one thing that concerns me when looking at the article are the number of sources. There are 171 sources, which makes me think that there have been many edit wars over time or that people may keep changing the page from time to time.

After reading the different Wikipedia pages, the Stanford Encyclopedia page and the important components of the article, I have come to realize some things that are important in creating our Wikipedia page. It’s very important that we work together cohesively and agree on the information that gets put into the article in order for it to all make sense together. Although we were all given a certain section, I now see the importance of everything looking over sections together so it flows well and it doesn’t seem like 25 different articles put into one.  Another thing that seems more important now is the categories and subcategories. It’s so important for the reader to know where to look for information and the titles really matter on the Wikipedia page.

Ethics and Humanity

Ethics is a system of moral principals and it sometimes seems to be ignored in our everyday lives whether it is in the classroom, work or something as basic as on the Internet.  Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is kept up to date by writers, editors and administrators. People are able to create pages and freely edit the pages, which would seem like a good way to keep the pages current but the problem is that people take advantage of the freedom of editing and they sometimes vandalize the site by writing inappropriate things on pages. 

Carra Leah Hood explains a situation she encountered on Wikipedia on her website Editing Out Obscenity: Wikipedia and Writing Pedagogy. She explains that she was looking up something on Wikipedia and she saw that there was an inappropriate racist phrase. She edited it and it only took two weeks for the situation to be all figured out.  In chapter 6, The Lessons of Wikipedia, Zittrain stated,  “Administrators can also prevent particular users from editing Wikipedia. Such blocks are rare and usually temporary. Persistent vandals usually get four warnings before any action is taken.” It appears that it is quite rare that try to vandalize sites over and over once they’ve already been caught but nonetheless, it still occurs.  Not only can people post inappropriate phrases, they can also just post incorrect information, which makes professors skeptical about their students using Wikipedia as a valid source.

When Wikipedia first started it was Nupedia. Nupedia was more of a blog than it was an encyclopedia because people couldn’t entries or comment on entries to question things. What was posted was just there and it couldn’t really be altered to accompany changes (Zittrain, 133).  Without change, whether on the Internet or in the everyday world, things aren’t able to grow or improve our lives. Just as Nupedia grew to Wikipedia, a better encyclopedia, change can also help the growth in our universities.

A lot like the ethical problems in Wikipedia, our universities have some ethical problems that need to be worked out. The number of African American students in American universities is very low compared to the number of white students and the bigger problem, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. states in Integrating the American Mind, is “keeping them.” Only a quarter of black students that attended Berkeley graduated or stayed the full four years back in the 80’s. The reason is not only a financial reason but also what our classes are teaching them.

Humanities is a topic that most universities teach; not only do they teach it but usually the students need to take a certain amount of hours in humanities courses to graduate college. It’s a way to teach students about the world they are living in. African American students don’t necessarily feel as if they are able to learn about their culture because American universities offer more classes about the history of America or Europe than they do about the Middle East, Asia or Africa. The humanities course in America have “meant the best that has been thought by white makes in the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian traditions…” instead of “the best that has been thought by all human beings” (Gates, pg. 346). Students need to be given the complete history of the world so they feel more comfortable in universities and so they feel like they belong just as much as a white student belongs in the university.

Teaching a class in a university is a lot like editing a webpage on Wikipedia. Its sharing information that a person thinks is important enough to share with a large group of people. It needs not only be correct information but it also must be relevant information that will make sense to the audience. It should be ethical and cater to the needs of the audience.

Reliable Information for a Reliable Wikipedia

Wikipedia articles are created by writers that find knowledge in other places and bring it to the Wikipedia page for users to read and gain knowledge. It is important that the information is correctly reported and that it is a nonbiased page for people to read to understand topics that they didn’t understand before reading the articles.

The Wikipedia article, Queen’s Building, Wolverhampton, from the Did you Know section tells the transformation of the building going from the carriage entrance to Wolverhampton railway station to part of the city’s existing bus station.  The article uses two references to create its content: The National Heritage List for England and Britain’s Historic Railway Buildings: A Gazetteer of Structures. They site the readings using Wikipedia’s reliable source page. When people edit the site they must site them by using inline citations with numbers and they must add the source to the bibliography at the end of the webpage or it is considered unreliable.  Both the sources that were used to create this Wikipedia article were both properly cited and seemed to be respectable sources.

Both sources are well known throughout England and seem like credibly sources.  The National Heritage List for England is a credible site that discusses the history or places and things around England. It contains archives of important information and is set up in a professional way. The second source, Britain’s Historic Railway Buildings: A Gazetteer of Structures is a book about the history of the railway structures. Since the Queen’s building was once a railway structure it would make complete sense that they would get their Wikipedia information through a source that was quite knowledgeable about that stuff. It isn’t only important for the sources that a Wikipedia page uses to be credible sources but they must also report the information back to the Wikipedia uses correctly or it will defeat the purpose of Wikipedia.

The information from The National Heritage List for England is all reliable and correctly reported information. There is a description paragraph at the end of the page that describes what it looks like and when important features were added onto the building. The Wikipedia mentions that front glass gates replaced iron gates and that an extension was added to each side of the building. Both of those occurred in the 20^th century. The information is from the website and the website’s details match the details that were given in Wikipedia’s Queen’s Building, Woverhampton article. I wasn’t able to check the pages of the other source because I don’t have it with me but since they use page numbers in their bibliography entry it would be hard to believe that they lied about the information because someone could  buy the book and look it up if they really felt like seeing if the facts were correctly reported to the readers.

In my opinion I think facts that came from the sources are reliable and so is the information in the Wikipedia article. The people that posted the information didn't go into great detail probably because they didn't have enough detail. That alone shows they they are only trying to post reliable information that they know to be correct.