Wikis and Contributions
Among the projects assigned to the law students is the ‘adoption’ of a week of class, with a particular topic. We are all free to edit the wiki. At first, I assumed I would dive right in. After all, after only one day of class I had submerged myself in the Wikipedia I had previously only waded in. (OK, enough swimming metaphors). I had written two new Wikipedia entries, instead of just making slight edits. Within a day, I was shot down by the sysops, who had posted a ‘welcome’ message in the discussion portion of my userpage and questioned the notability of my topics.
On one, they were right. I headed over to the pages that discussed notability and the discussion page paired with it. There was no complete agreement – and so with the organization (or lack thereof) of Wikipedia I could have simply disputed the deletion, pointing out that there are no hard and fast rules about how notable something needs to be. After all, there is no lack of band space, just a concern about disambiguation (crowding Wikipedia with many minute essays with similar names to notable ones, causing confusion) and just an over saturation. And, after all, it is an encyclopedia.
But there did seem to be general consensus about what should and should not be added in a particular area. The communitarian (anarcho-syndicalist commune?) format of Wikipedia works because people generally follow such consensus. I realized that there was no set consensus for the other subject, so I edited and expanded the entry to make it more obvious what was notable about the subject.
The finishing comment from the sysop urged me to clean up the article. I bristled a bit at that. Wasn’t the whole idea of Wikipedia that the entries are the result of a drafting process by other users? Why not just let it sit, letting others expand and write the entry, achieving the neutral tone that is so much easier with many cooks (I only promised not to make tortured analogies about swimming, remember?)
So back to my Week project – why had I done barely anything? Perhaps I was hesitant after being chastised by the volunteer so prolific he was crowned admin. But the class wiki is not the same, indeed expansion is in our interest at this stage, if only to ‘get things started’. I think the very idea that I bristled it had been compounded by the group aspect. Just as I expected others to ‘clean up’ my article, I was taking it for granted that the fact that other names were on my list meant that they would be expanding it – taking the pressure off of me. And putting it on. After all, this is a group project – who am I to decide its direction or express a point of view?
This is not a sitcom of a blog entry. I do not have some comment about how I figured it all out in the end and wrapped it up into a neat little package. I suppose that is why this is a class- and this is the stage where recognizing what I need to figure out is a necessary first step. The others will come later.