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.