Wikipedia Reflection

Working on our class Wikipedia project has been an intense, frustrating, yet overall very rewarding process for me as a student, writer and an editor. My team, "Team Nomenclature," was comprised of a diverse group of students and I believe we worked well, tirelessly writing and editing not only each other's work, but that of our peers. Prior to this project I had never before worked within the medium of Wikipedia. Quite frankly, I was plagued with the high school teacher's perception of Wikipedia, which was DONT use Wikipedia. My entire life as a student I'd been told that Wikipedia was not a reliable source, due to it's ease of peer editing and not entirely approved source content.

Ironically enough, this project's duty lay within utilizing the editing ease of Wikipedia, and now I can honestly say that my teachers in high school were not entirely right about the source. While it is certainly true that anybody can edit a Wikipedia story, "anybody" is also edited, and re-edited and then re-re-edited until that first work may appear somewhat unrecognizable to the first draft. This is such an interesting medium, because as Zittrain discusses in his article "Lessons of Wikipedia," Wikipedia's freedom of editing does not always cause misinformation like my teachers had thought, but rather its unique qualities ie: "an absence of rules (or at least enforcement) has lead both to a generative blossoming and to a new round of challenges at multiple layers." 

I truly underestimated the amount of work that goes into constructing a Wikipedia post. My group worked on the Contemporary Concerns section, and I did the subsection "Ethics." While I did find it easy to utilize course texts to the benefit of my post, I found myself struggling with the writing style of Wikipedia. I never realized how much of my writing is comprised of "claims," and not factual statements, which is obviously what an objective article should be comprised of. Also prominent in the construction of this project, was the risk of plagiarizing. This is always a risk in any kind of academic writing, however as Russel Wiebe asserts in "Plagiarism and Promiscuity, Authors and Plagiarisms," it is almost impossible to not take from multiple sources when writing. We, even if subconsciously, are constantly taking from and deriving inspiration from many different places. (43-6) This concept is really at the heart of the Wikipedia medium. 

Writing within this medium was a big challenge for me, and although I did struggle with it at times, I found the entire project to be largely rewarding learning experience. During last Tuesday's in-class peer review my groups content on the Wikipedia Workspace was accidentally deleted, and at that moment I definitely had a mini-heart attack. Luckily, our work was not entirely lost, but this scare definitely did give me further insight into the risks of creating content on such a website. We truly were working together in a space of trust during this project, considering anybody at any moment could literally erase somebody else's work. This goes right back to Zittrain's assertion, that Wikipedia really is a community wherein giving everybody equal authority results in harmony, rather than chaos.