Utente:Giac83/Teaching wiki

da http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2824/2746

Abstract

Digital spaces on the World Wide Web can be consumed as windowed technologies, providing apparently transparent access to information, or as mirrors, multi–layered and complex, requiring critical reflexivity for productive participation. Approaching Wikipedia as a mirrored technology exploits its potential as a pedagogical tool with which students can improve their research practices and writing proficiency in digital environments. Students can learn to grapple with Wikipedia as a complex, living discourse community, whose rhetorical practices and technical conventions they must learn in order to make contributions to it that are accepted by fellow editors of the site and withstand its unique editorial processes. By writing for Wikipedia, students become critical users of this digital resource, develop rhetorical and technological proficiency, and generate texts that prompt real–world response and provide potentially useful information for fellow users of this massive digital resource.

Introduction

Some librarians and faculty in a variety of disciplines rehearse to students the dangers of using Wikipedia. While I agree that the exclusive use of Wikipedia or any encyclopedia is unacceptable for academic research, I acknowledge Wikipedia’s utility as a quick reference tool and starting point for research and argue that its ubiquity underscores the need to grapple with it in our classrooms. Rather than abstractly warning students away from Wikipedia or teaching them to critique its deficiencies in comparison to print models, this article advocates instructing students to approach Wikipedia as a mirrored technology, multi–layered and complex, and to make contributions to it with an awareness that they are both participating in a structured and complex discourse community and learning to use an unfamiliar digital technology. Success in participating in this community is largely determined by grasping its mores and acquiring the requisite technological, research, and rhetorical skills to make contributions that are appropriate and lasting. This article explains how Wikipedia can be viewed as a mirrored technology and how approaching it from this perspective harnesses its pedagogical power.

Electronic media as window or mirror

As media, computers often are presented to general users as windowed technologies (Bolter and Gromala, 2003). Users look through the screen at the information they collect and the texts they compose largely without understanding how the technologies that they are using function. For example, browsers such as Safari and Internet Explorer allow users to access information stored in servers all over the world without comprehending or even considering the process through which that information is delivered. Additionally, social networking sites like Facebook and blogging sites like Blogger allow individuals and organizations to publish consistently designed content on the World Wide Web without being required to understand HTML markup or cascading style sheets (CSS). While the ability to use digital media without grasping how it works facilitates its apparent ease of use, as Dilger (2008) explains, this approach allows users to remain unskilled and widens the divide between the experts who have technological knowhow and users who passively receive media as served but struggle to customize, troubleshoot, or participate in creating it. Thus, while the digital divide has generally referred to the separation of people based on their material access to technologies, another boundary separates consumers of technologically delivered content from producers. The authors behind DigiRhet.org delineate this division quite aptly: “We see a divide where students may download complex, multimodal documents but lack the training to understand how to construct similar documents. We see a digital divide where the rhetorics of digital documents become increasingly layered in new technologies and are engaged by one–way reception rather than through true interactivity and collaborative meaning making” [1].

Bolter and Gromala (2003) argue that the first step in understanding how digital technologies work and how they shape our experiences involves recognizing the technologies as media, as constructed interfaces: “But if we cannot also step back and see the interface as a technical creation, then we are missing half of the experience that new digital media can offer” [2]. Innovative digital media facilitate the ability of users to treat them as transparent windows through which to access content and as mirrors that allow and encourage users to see, simultaneously, a reflection of the media’s use in context, helping users to be aware of the technologies’ designs, their status as constructed media, and the mechanisms through which they function (Bolter and Gromala, 2003). The reflexive nature of the mirrored aspects of technologies can be highlighted in order to foster critical perspectives in users, aiding them to understand that such technologies can be altered to better suit their needs (Bolter and Gromala, 2003). Therefore, as Dilger (2008) argues, learning to write for/with digital media is best approached through translucence as opposed to transparency, employing a process in which users incrementally investigate and learn to manipulate digital technologies, including the code or scripts that comprise them, to build competence [3].

Many objections to Wikipedia approach it as a windowed technology, one whose construction and interface are ignored as users seek to look through it and consume the content provided uncritically as fact. Despite numerous analyses of the quality of content in Wikipedia that compare it favorably with similar encyclopedic resources (Giles, 2005; Rosenzweig, 2006; Stvilia, et al., 2005; West and Williamson, 2009; Willinsky, 2007), Wikipedia continues to be labeled as generally unreliable largely because it fails to provide the window to knowledge that it seemingly promises. Wikipedia’s location online and delivery though personal computers encourage users to approach it as a window: “… the word window helps us to forget the interface and concentrate on the text or data inside. Just as we gaze through a window in the physical world, the GUI’s window metaphor suggests that the interface can present data, words or images, as they ‘really are’ — without distorting them” [4]. Critics of Wikipedia often fault its deficiencies as a window, claiming that it distorts knowledge by providing content that is not reviewed and may be untrue and by requiring no obvious or verifiable credentials for contributors (Schiff, 2006). The latter attribute proves to be most disturbing to faculty and scholars, for without the approval transmuted to Wikipedia’s content through the prestige and authority of authors’ credentials, academic or otherwise, readers cannot prejudge the proffered content’s veracity (Maddox, 2007; Santana and Wood, 2009). Even Maria Mattus (2009) who encourages readers to accept Wikipedia on its own terms longs for a designation of quality for articles: “Both passive and active users would be helped by an easily comprehensible symbol that shows the article’s present reliability, readability, and scientific level” [5]. However, as this article demonstrates, student users gain the most from Wikipedia through active participation in its development, not passive consumption of its content, however that content is labeled.

For some, the desire for digital technologies to function as windows is strong, and, in order to provide an alternative to Wikipedia that can be treated as transparent, providing users with carefully vetted and edited truth produced by identified, reliable authors, at least two organizations have begun new online encyclopedias. One is Citizendium begun by Larry Sanger, an original co–founder of Wikipedia. Citizendium: The Citizens’ Compendium employs wiki technology but unlike Wikipedia, contributors must request accounts under their real names, which are verified. Additionally, distinctions are made between authors, who contribute content; editors, who make contributions and also guide and approve the contributions of others; and constables, a discrete group of members who remove disrespectful comments and bar those repeatedly engaging in unprofessional behavior [6]. Google has also developed an alternative to Wikipedia, Knol, that is centered on traditional notions of authorship. Articles in Knol are written by identified individuals instead of through mass collaboration, are attributed, and are only editable by the original authors (Cornnell, 2008). By clearly identifying attribution and reviewing content, both alternative online encyclopedias purport to provide transparent access to knowledge, allowing or even encouraging readers to ignore mediation and treat the encyclopedias like the printed texts they already trust.

To help students to avoid treating Wikipedia as the transparent window to information that, as a result of its mission and open editorial process, it cannot be, students should be taught to approach this technology as a mirror. The remainder of this article demonstrates how to guide students to revision their approach to Wikipedia in part by developing targeted assignments that prompt students to learn how to productively contribute to it while simultaneously revealing how knowledge is constructed in this digital media [7].

Wikipedia as mirror

The pedagogical utility of approaching Wikipedia as a mirror lies in the ability of such an approach to aid students to view it as a complex discourse community and multi–layered, knowledge–making experiment. Teaching students to consume its windowed content more critically is insufficient, as this technique does not provide them with tools to resist the seduction of apparent transparency. To uncover the mirrored aspects of Wikipedia, students need to learn to peel back its layers and look behind the text, in others words, to look at it in addition to looking through it [8]. Based on wiki technology, each article in Wikipedia is comprised of four main layers or tabs (see Figure 1): 1) the Article tab that contains the text, graphics, and citations that comprise the content; 2) the Discussion (Talk) tab that provides access to writer–editors’ discussions and debates about the article’s content and contributions to it; 3) the Edit tab where text/graphics can be added or removed from the article and the formatting code that controls the display of the information can be viewed and changed; and, 4) the View history tab that logs all changes to the article and allows writer–editors and readers to access and compare current and previous versions.

http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewFile/2824/2746/28734 Figure 1: A screenshot of the Wikipedia interface focused on tabs.

By viewing Wikipedia as a mirrored technology, noting the layers of the interface and acquiring the expertise to use them effectively, student–editors can exploit its unique features and comprehend the extraordinary manner in which it is built and developed: “At its heart, wikinomics involves motivated amateurs who voluntarily produce knowledge and information in a new form of social and managerial organization. Socially, a wiki–ized system cannot exist without an agreement among the members of that system to behave in a certain fashion” [9]. Wikipedia is this sort of complex system and the rules governing writer–editors’ actions continue to develop and become codified (Schiff, 2006; Staley, 2009). As Davidson (2007) notes, “Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia. It is a knowledge community, uniting anonymous readers all over the world who edit and correct grammar, style, interpretations, and facts. It is a community devoted to a common good — the life of the intellect” [10]. In fact, some scholars deemphasize questions about Wikipedia’s quality or credibility, focusing instead on the process through which knowledge is proposed and refined collaboratively in this unique space. As Campbell (2009) argues, Wikipedia’s contribution lies in its power as a nexus of linked knowledge, a “multidimensional space” [11]: “The content of any particular article is less to the point than how it fits into the network of articles and other information to which it is linked” [12]. Others emphasize the process by which knowledge is created, specifically through debate and negotiation, referred to as consensus in the terminology of Wikipedia (Barton, 2005; Medelyan, et al., 2009).

By participating in this community, students can exchange ideas with other writer–editors and receive feedback about their contributions, gaining a material and often rapid response to their writing that they seldom receive within strictly academic contexts. Students can certainly learn to use wiki technologies and practice their writing skills by using wikis exclusively accessible to a specific institution or class, but these controlled spaces do not provide students with the opportunity to participate in a growing, organic, knowledge–making community in which the unexpected, in terms of feedback both positive and negative, will happen. Furthermore, Wikipedia provides an ideal space for student participation because it is a tool that students are already drawn to for information seeking and research but to which they seldom contribute voluntarily. As Lim (2009) found in his survey of 134 students in an introductory communications course, 100 percent of participants reported using Wikipedia; however, few respondents reported use that included adding or editing content [13]. In order to fully appreciate and participate in the community of Wikipedia, students need to read behind the articles (Davidson, 2007), learning how to self–consciously work in each layer of the interface. The sections below explore Wikipedia’s unique conventions and the four layers/tabs of Wikipedia articles and highlight the manner in which a student–editor’s awareness and understanding of these features and portions of the texts contribute to harnessing the power of Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool useful in highlighting the mirrored aspects of digital media.

Adapting to stylistic and technological conventions and terminologies

Prior to beginning to write successfully for Wikipedia, students must learn the conventions of the site. While it is true that any user can make edits to existing articles, to add new content or make other substantive contributions, writer–editors are encouraged to register with the site and to read the basic style guides for contributors [14]. Assignments involving student contributions to Wikipedia should be created so as to incorporate an introduction to the guidelines, conventions, terminologies, and technical expertise required for making useful contributions; digesting these guidelines constitutes the first step in helping students to recognize Wikipedia as an interface and understand how it is constructed.

As Jones (2008) explains, Wikipedia has specialized terminology to refer to activities that take place on the site [15]. For example, reversion is the act of erasing recent edits to an article and returning it to a previous instantiation. Vandalism, often done by users labeled as trolls, is the term for destructively motivated alterations to articles that deliberately introduce false information or revert large sections of content without cause. The Discussion tabs of each article are called Talk pages on which writer–editors debate the content and the changes/additions/deletions they make to an article. Consensus refers to the preferred manner of resolving disputes, through dialogue and persuasion, resulting in improvements to entries in the encyclopedia. As Gee (2003) argues, students develop literacy through participating in a fully developed discourse community with social practices that must be understood and to which they must adhere. With its fully developed language and continually evolving processes and policies, Wikipedia constitutes a living discourse community in which students can advance their ability to achieve critical literacy in their approaches to research and writing.

Technological literacy also proves to be important in successfully contributing new content to Wikipedia, particularly when proposing a new article or building on a brief, preexisting article, or stub in Wikipedia’s terminology. Wikipedia’s “Help: Editing” article [16] explains the most commonly used tags needed to format articles correctly, including how to make section headings, internal and external links, and lists. A separate article entitled “Wikipedia: Citing sources,” [17] outlines when to cite sources and explains how to create footnotes, end notes, and inline citations. While their instructions are thorough and accessible, formatting articles correctly requires attention to detail and an ability to apply general guidelines to specific situations. Through the process of learning to use the formatting tags and designing articles that conform to Wikipedia’s common layout, students develop a level of technological proficiency that can empower them to participate successfully in this discourse community (see Figure 2). Students can learn to use the formatting tags through tutorials that are completed either during or outside of class. Such exercises can prompt students to first learn to read the tags, match the tagged text to the desired design features, and then progress to playing with the formatting tags to achieve a desired design. Wikipedia provides a sandbox that is open to users to experiment with as they learn to write for Wikipedia. In the sandbox, students can practice using the formatting tags that they are learning in a low stakes but real environment; the sandbox is cleaned (erased) automatically every 12 hours [18].

http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewFile/2824/2746/28735 Figure 2: Example of wiki markup.

While technological expertise is importance and gaining it requires effort, the greatest hurdle students often need to overcome in order to contribute to Wikipedia relates to topic selection. In order to address the inertia often promoted by the apparently boundless number of topics from which a writer–editor can select when deciding to write for Wikipedia, students can be advised to work from an existing stub instead of attempting to initiate completely new articles that may or may not be accepted as necessary or desirable by other writer–editors of Wikipedia. Within Wikipedia, a stub is an article placeholder that contains very little content but has been designated as in need of development. The benefits of requiring students to base their contributions on stubs are numerous: 1) stubs exist on subjects generally already determined by the Wikipedia community to be worthy of inclusion; 2) beginning with stubs prevents a focus on content requiring little research, such as a student’s high school or hometown; and, 3) expanding a stub generally requires students to research the topic in order to make useful contributions, as stubs are not generally related to general knowledge. An alphabetized listing of stubs is located in Wikipedia on the page entitled “Category: Stub categories” [19]. Students could also be required to focus on stubs related to specific course–relevant subject matter, such as an historical event or issue in science [20]. Most stubs contain only a title and a brief introductory paragraph. As a result, by expanding a stub, students can make the entry their own. Doing so generally requires them to develop a structure for the article, a task which includes using the aforementioned formatting tags to create a table of contents, an information box, headings, paragraphs, and footnotes and/or references. In essence, stubs provide student–editors with a community–sanctioned starting point while simultaneously allowing them to assume a role as first–author or article–creator. Prompting students to take on the article–creator role rather than making basic contributions to existing articles helps them to engage most fully in the complete range of writing and design activities possible on Wikipedia. As Ehmann, et al. (2008) found in their research regarding the levels of participation of various types of editors on the site, article–creators perform the greatest range of edit types per article.

Importantly, Wikipedia reinforces a favorite mantra of faculty, namely the importance of citing secondary sources. Information added to Wikipedia entries is expected to be based on secondary sources; original research or personal reflections are actively discouraged. Articles are regularly identified and tagged as having insufficient or questionable citations (see Figure 3) [21]. Thus, Wikipedia’s community of editors provides support for faculty attempting to teach students how and why to provide appropriate and thorough citations of secondary sources. As will be discussed below, a lack of appropriate citations often prompts discussion on an article’s Talk tab in addition to the request for revisions/additions to the article posted at the top of the article itself.

http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewFile/2824/2746/28736 Figure 3: Example note from Wikipedia editors designating an article as having an insufficient number of secondary sources.

Likewise, internal citation is also important and integrating the article into Wikipedia by creating links to related articles within the online encyclopedia is an essential part of developing successful content. When intelligently and mindfully placed, such links add depth to articles, enhance the collaborative aspects of the space, and function as an additional form of citation signaling the author–editor’s awareness of how their entry meshes with other relevant content on Wikipedia. As Medelyan, et al. (2009) found, “[most articles] are densely interlinked,” [22] containing “an average of 25 incoming and 25 outgoing links per article” [23]. Student–editors must, therefore, use both sorts of citation in order to create content with the potential for long–term inclusion in Wikipedia.

Developing reflexivity through the Discussion (Talk) tab

The second tab, Discussion, is one of the most reflexive and mirrored layers of articles in Wikipedia. In this layer, writer–editors debate the changes made to an article and discuss what further information or other revisions the article needs (Miller, 2005). This layer also provides a place for disputes to be negotiated. In order to succeed in having their edits accepted, student–editors must learn to articulate clearly their rationales for the additions and deletions they make and include those on the Discussion layer of the article to which they make contributions. This layer provides a rare, real–world space in which such reflection is integral to the writing process. Pollard (2008) cites the importance of this layer in providing student–editors with a place to “share their thinking about the construction of the entry and to defend any edits” [24]. As Maehre (2009) argues, in the context of Wikipedia, a writer–editor’s ability to provide persuasive justifications for their changes on the Discussion (Talk) page ranks higher and proves to be a better justification for their credibility than is a claim to particular credentials. Furthermore, according to Ehmann, et al. (2008), raising concerns on an article’s Discussion (Talk) page results in real agency for editors: “Additionally, as the observations between Talk page discussion and editing of a given article reveal, raising one’s concerns about an article is likely to result in change to that article. Therefore, contributions to Talk pages — in addition to article edits themselves — provide Wikipedians with a powerful means of shaping the presentation of knowledge” [25].

The subjects covered on the Discussion (Talk) pages of articles range from rhetorical to stylistic (Ehmann, et al., 2008); and all entries are signed with user names or IP addresses and are dated. For example, the Discussion (Talk) page for the article entitled “History of Biology,” [26] which was the featured article on the main page of Wikipedia on 3 June 2009, contains discussions about the appropriate content for inclusion and several debates about that content; the relevance of particular sources; American versus British spellings; and, the veracity of a number of facts. Most input from various writer–editors to this article’s Discussion layer is thoughtful, respectfully offered, and substantive.

To participate in the sort of debate that takes place on these Discussion (Talk) pages, student–editors need to be certain of their sources and content and rhetorically savvy enough to argue for their perspectives regarding everything from the data or facts they cite to their sentence structure, which requires a greater amount of documented reflexivity than is generally demanded in academic writing. While student–editors certainly expose themselves to indelicately proffered critique through participating in the dialogue taking place on the Discussion (Talk) pages of their articles, research reports that unconstructive and abusive comments are rare in this space (Ehmann, et al., 2008). From an anecdotal perspective, based on my own small classes (20 students in each class), none of my students were presented with rude or improper feedback, although a number were prompted to lively debate and had to argue thoughtfully and vigorously in support of the content they added. Students discovered that garnering a higher level of expertise is necessary for contributing to Wikipedia and ensuring that their contributions remain intact. By working in this community, students can see the real–world relevance of being able to defend and argue particular perspectives; they are called upon to reflexively build this mirrored technology in context.

Cultivating technological proficiency on the Edit tab

By clicking on the Edit tab, writer–editors can add content to a section of an article, remove content, add sections, upload graphics, add footnotes, and add citations. Edits are made section by section, but sections can also be moved or deleted. This tab is most important in revealing the constructed nature of Wikipedia as media to students, for, in the process of adding text, editors must also add the formatting tags mentioned above that create visual markers of emphasis in articles, such as bolding; create discursive endnotes or footnotes linked to references at the bottom of the article; and, create internal and external links (see Figure 4). For example, students can easily link a word or phrase in their text to another article within Wikipedia using the following simple tags: link text in which the brackets designate a link, the article title is the precise name of another Wikipedia article, and the link text is the text within the student’s article on which readers would click in order to view the Wikipedia article to which the link refers. Similarly, section headings are created merely by placing two equal signs on either side of a line of text (e.g., ==Subheading==). In my course, learning the basic markup to format their Wikipedia articles provides an incremental introduction to the concept of markup, preparing students for the World Wide Web design projects that they will complete later in the semester.

http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewFile/2824/2746/28737 Figure 4: Example of the edit tab.

Writer–editors are also encouraged to summarize and explain the changes they make in the edit summary box that appears after each section on the Edit tab. Students may find that providing thoughtful and well–supported explanations of their changes and formatting their entries correctly are key to their contributions’ longevity on the site.

In working in the Edit tab, students are truly peering behind the surface of Wikipedia’s articles to see how the interface works, both technically and rhetorically. Their contributions require a mirrored view of the media, literally viewing and participating in its textual development and visual design. They cannot ignore Wikipedia’s interface or status as media because awareness of these elements is a requirement of full participation. Such awareness leads to a greater critical analysis of Wikipedia and its content than is fostered by consumption or even an analysis of its content, however critical.

Fostering critical reflection through the History tab

The final tab marked View history catalogues each article’s incremental changes and the times and dates for those changes and allows readers and editors to compare versions of the article to reveal differences. By recording all edits and identifying who made them, as least by user name or IP address, the View history layer highlights responsibility for edits. As Miller (2005) notes, “Just because anyone can make changes doesn’t free a writer from responsibility for what they write” [27]. While IP addresses do not necessary identify individual users, repeated, malicious submissions from a specific IP can result in the blocking of submissions by Wikipedia administrators from that address to the site [28]. Administrators are admonished to use this power judiciously as blocking a shared IP address can affect users not involved in malicious posting to the site. As a result of a tendency toward administrator restraint, such blocks are generally temporary. Additionally, innovative malicious users may subvert this safeguard by logging on from an alternate IP. While this system is not foolproof, it does provide some level of accountability for problematic behavior even by anonymous users.

Studies of the View history tab of groups of articles have resulted in interesting analyses of the number, types, effects, and origins of edits to articles on the site. For example, Stvilia, et al. (2005) used the View history tab to determine that for the 236 articles that they examined, over two–thirds of the edits made in a 42–day period were made by registered editors. Furthermore, in these articles, Stvilia, et al. (2005) found a very small number of reversions, only 12, indicating that most editors make additions or changes to the text contributed by other users; complete erasures of fellow editors’ contributions are relatively uncommon. Likewise, based on an examination of article histories, Wilkinson and Huberman (2007) determined that article quality increases with the number of edits and the number of discrete editors. Pfeil, et al. (2006) used the View history tab of articles on the sample subject of “games” from different language versions of Wikipedia to compare the edits and contributions of writer–editors from different cultural backgrounds. The View history tab enables readers and editors of Wikipedia to approach the text analytically, providing them with insights about the development of a given text that are impossible to glean about other types of textual resources, print or electronic.

The ability to compare versions of articles at any point in their development using the View history tab also provides faculty with a convenient manner by which to track students’ contributions to their articles. Comparing articles in process and examining the revisions of pieces over time facilitates classroom discussions concerning the nature of substantive revision. Likewise, the View history tab allows students to track the development of their articles and visually gauge their own contributions (see Figure 5).

http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewFile/2824/2746/28738 Figure 5: Comparison of revisions to an article.

Students in my courses take their contributions quite seriously and are productively engaged in debating their contributions with others on the site long after the portion of the semester overtly dedicated to the assignment. My writing–for–Wikipedia assignment also requires students to revisit their articles approximately one month after posting them and write a report detailing what has become of their contributions and positing the reasons for any changes or deletions. Therefore, the View history tab is an essential tool for students to employ in order to reflect on the development of their texts over the course of a month. This reflective portion of the assignment is necessary to harness the power of Wikipedia as a mirrored technology. Examining the evolution of their contributions and critically analyzing how these contributions have been received and used by others in the Wikipedia community prompts students to view their writing differently as part of a living text with actual readers. Students are forced to confront their writing and research skills and technological efficacy in light of feedback from other users of Wikipedia. This feedback may prove to be more powerful than feedback from instructors in motivating students to revise and advance their writing, research, and technological skills.

Conclusion

Viewing Wikipedia as a mirror and learning to work in all levels of its interface transforms the resource for students from a consumptive space into a productive community. Pollard (2008) argues that requiring students to write for Wikipedia in response to a carefully designed assignment teaches them skills important for “twenty–first–century learners” including “digital–age literacy, inventive thinking, effective communication, and high productivity” [29]. Making useful and lasting contributions to Wikipedia involves student–editors in an extensive writing and research project that requires them to grapple with all layers of this complex media to develop the requisite understanding and expertise required for success. Students experience immediate benefits from having acquired this expertise by having their work published and viewing the responses it elicits from others in the community. Furthermore, engaging in this reflexive process also aids them in developing a critical perspective towards this media both as a resource and as a digital technology with a particular type of interface, one with benefits and drawbacks for readers and contributors.

Maehre (2009) argues that we often privilege process in writing instruction but product in teaching research: “It seems to me that professors put too much emphasis on the source rather than the information itself. A journal article may be ‘better,’ overall, than a Wikipedia entry on the same subject, but how does that disqualify a particular piece of information that is mined from the latter?” [30] Similarly, Kittle and Hicks (2009) argue that by focusing solely on specific entries’ factual deficiencies, critics of Wikipedia “demonstrate a mindset focused on the final product to the exclusion of the social processes involved in creating that product” [31]. Such an approach both downplays process while treating texts that are perpetually in flux in this electronic space as if they were static and complete. In contrast, interacting with Wikipedia as a complex discourse community foregrounds and interrogates the continual process through which the knowledge contained therein is proposed, negotiated, and revised based on discursive interactions between users and highlights the skills that writer–editors must develop to support their contributions. Wikipedia’s most important contributions and innovations to knowledge production are located in the unique communicative practices of writer–editors on the site who through their own volition contribute to this ever–evolving knowledge base. Thus, as other scholars have noted, Wikipedia stands out not because of the accuracy of its content, but because of the manner through which any and all content placed on the site is generated, largely without the intervention of a controlling, gate-keeping editorial staff. Wikipedia has been called “a large–scale collaborative ontology development environment” [32], employing wiki technology that facilitates a view of a text or entry “as a process of rational–critical debate towards a specific goal” [33]. Viewing Wikipedia as a mirrored–technology, requiring active and reflexive participation for effective use, supports these scholarly perspectives and highlights its unique features, features that can be harnessed to enhance a pedagogy focusing on developing a practice of critical literacy, one particularly necessary for successfully negotiating the enormity of content found in growing digital environments. End of article

About the author

Colleen Reilly’s teaching and research focus on professional and technical writing theory and pedagogy; electronic composition and citation; computer gaming and literacy; and, gender, sexuality, and technology. Her publications include several chapters in edited collections and in the journals Computers and Composition and Innovate related to citation analysis, the intersections of writing and digital media, and pedagogical strategies for research and writing in digital contexts. E–mail: reillyc [at] uncw [dot] edu

Notes

1. DigiRhet.org, 2006, p. 236.

2. Bolter and Gromala, 2003, p. 27.

3. Dilger, 2008, p. 128.

4. Bolter and Gromala, 2003, p. 42.

5. Mattus, 2009, p. 197.

6. Citizendium: The Citizens’ Compendium: FAQ, at http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:FAQ, accessed 19 December 2010.

7. See Reilly (forthcoming) for an example assignment that includes student learning outcomes and grading criteria.

8. See Lanham (1993) for an exploration of AT/THROUGH oscillations and McKee (2005) for additional pedagogical implications.

9. Staley, 2009, p. 28.

10. Davidson, 2007, p. B20.

11. Campbell, 2009, p. 186.

12. Ibid.

13. Lim, 2009, p. 2,192.

14. See “Wikipedia: Editing policy” at http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_policy, accessed 19 December 2010; and, “Wikipedia: Manual of style” at http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style, accessed 19 December 2010.

15. See “Wikipedia: Glossary” at http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Glossary, accessed 19 December 2010.

16. “Help: Editing,” Wikipedia, at http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing, accessed 19 December 2010.

17. “Wikipedia: Citing Sources,” at http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources, accessed 19 December 2010.

18. See “Wikipedia: Sandbox” at http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox, accessed 19 December 2010.

19. “Category: Stub categories” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Stub_categories, accessed 20 December 2010.

20. See Pollard (2008) for an assignment related to witchcraft.

21. See also Maehre, 2009, p. 234.

22. Medelyan, et al., 2009, p. 721.

23. Ibid.

24. Pollard, 2008, p. 12.

25. Ehmann, et al., 2008, para. 88.

26. “History of Biology,” Wikipedia at http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_biology, accessed 19 December 2010.

27. Miller, 2005, p. 40.

28. “Wikipedia: Blocking IP Addresses,” at http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_IP_addresses, accessed 19 December 2010.

29. Pollard, 2008, pp. 20–21.

30. Author’s emphasis; Maehre, 2009, p. 230.

31. Kittle and Hicks, 2009, p. 531.

32. Medelyan, et al., 2009, p. 723.

33. Barton, 2005, p. 187.

References

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Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala, 2003. Windows and mirrors: Interaction design, digital art, and the myth of transparency. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Charles Campbell, 2009. “Review: Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia,” TDR: The Drama Review, volume 53, number 4, pp. 185–187.

Mike Cornnell, 2008. “Google: Designing a user–generated encyclopedia,” Information Today, volume 25, number 6, pp. 39–40.

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Editorial history

Received 21 January 2010; accepted 1 December 2010; revised 20 December 2010.

Creative Commons License “Teaching Wikipedia as a mirrored technology” by Colleen A. Reilly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Teaching Wikipedia as a mirrored technology by Colleen A. Reilly. First Monday, Volume 16, Number 1 - 3 January 2011 http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2824/2746