|
Articles Conference Reviews |
200788HartSession 8.8: The Wisdom of Wikis: Public Ownership of the Means of Instruction
Matt Barton (St. Cloud State University) and Bob Cummings (Columbus State University) Matt Barton, St. Cloud State University: “The Wisdom of Wikis” Barton began with a discussion of the use of metaphors to describe what a wiki “looks like.” He suggested that all metaphors highlight some things but leave others out. According to Barton, one common metaphor he’s heard others use to describe wikis is the palimpsest. He rejects this metaphor for its focus on the medium and the material rather than the communal aspects of wikis. So what, he asked, might an appropriate communally-focused metaphor be? A rhizome? Hell (a chaotic place full of deranged people; an anarchy run by degenerates)? While he recognized that these metaphors have some appeal, the metaphor he wanted the audience to consider adopting was the medieval guild. The medieval guild, claimed Barton, is a particularly apt metaphor for the wiki because of the ways in which guilds were organized, managed, and structured hierarchically. For instance, he explained, the king or ruler does not set up a guild; the workers organize themselves and are, in fact, protected against the rulers. Among the historical guilds, Barton viewed the Islamic guilds of archiving and translation as the most fitting to compare to wiki communities as their work was defined not as wage labor but as work done for the community without personal gain. Barton then drew a parallel to a more contemporary guild model, the World of Warcraft game guilds. These on-line gaming guilds also promote the virtues of drawing together people with specialized talents in order to achieve a common goal through the efficient division of labor. Contributors to wikis too rely on disparate communities of varied talent to produce texts that are not meant for personal gain but for the benefit of others. Barton then suggested parallels between the medieval guilds, the modern game guilds, and Wikipedians in terms of hierarchical structure. While the members of medieval guilds moved through the stages of apprentice, journeyman, and master, the players in the game guilds begin as noobs and then advance to the level of officers and finally become masters. In Wikipedia, contributors must start out simply as registered users and then, once they prove themselves, they may be advanced to admin/sysops and eventually rise to the status of bureaucrats/stewards. Next, Barton outlined the extant programs in Wikipedia designed to “train wiki Jedis”:
In the case of classroom assignments and student contributions to Wikipedia, Barton recommended that teachers get their students into the Wiki-Adoption program. Having given an overview of the similarities between guild apprenticeship and Wikipedia training, Barton moved on to discuss the ways in which various Wikipedia communities also resemble guild membership:
In addition to these communities, Barton commented on the vast amount of discussion that takes place among contributors to Wikipedia. In conclusion, Barton summarized his reasons for selecting “guild” as his metaphor of choice for wikis:
Bob Cummings, Columbus State University: “Does Collaborative Writing Sacrifice Style? The Readability of Wikipedia Pages” Cummings began with an overview of Robert McHenry's 2004 anti-Wikipedia article, “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia,” published in TCS Daily and the 2005 Nature article “Internet encyclopaedias go head to head,” which compared Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica on-line. In his article, McHenry, a former editor of the print version of Encyclopedia Britannica, outlines his main problems with Wikipedia. According to Cummings, McHenry views a collaboratively authored document that can be edited by anyone as a document that lacks accountability and cannot replicate the work done by a single, skilled, knowledgeable writer. As an illustrative example, McHenry chose to point to a factual ambiguity in the birth date of Alexander Hamilton in the article about this historical figure. While McHenry acknowledges the historical uncertainty of the year of Hamilton's birth, he regards the internal inconsistency and lack of acknowledgment of this uncertainty as serious flaws in the Wikipedia article – flaws that result, he speculates, from the collaborative authorship. McHenry goes on to point out numerous problems with the style, grammar, and diction of the multi-authored article, as well as typographic errors. Cummings concluded his summary of the McHenry article by conceding that McHenry's critique does point to some problems with the credibility and lack of continuity of style in on-line collaborative writing. Next Cummings outlined the results of Nature's comparison of Wikipedia entries to Encyclopedia Britannica on-line articles. Nature selected 42 matching entries from each source on subjects related to the scientific disciplines, which they then sent out to subject-matter experts for review. The reviewers found only eight “serious errors” -- four from each source. Approximately 4 factual errors or omissions were found in each Wikipedia article, while 3 such errors were found in each Britannica article. Cummings acknowledged that these flaws were flaws of content rather than style. However, several reviewers did comment on the relative drop in readability of the Wikipedia articles because of their structure. As Cummings explained, this issue of readability was investigated further by Mark Bell (aka “storygeek”) in his Master's thesis, “The Transformation of the Encyclopedia: A Textual Analysis and Comparison of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia.” As Cummings explained, Bell made a qualitative rather than quantitative comparison between Wikipedia and Britannica articles. For his research, Bell compared two articles, upon which he ran readability tests, including a grammar analysis of noun and verb use and how statements of facts and values were constructed in the articles. Bell's results showed no significant differences, causing him to conclude that a collective writes in a similar way to singular authors and editors. Cummings went on to suggest that the unacknowledged discrepancies over Alexander Hamilton's birth in the Wikipedia article might therefore be a matter of readability -- an example of how multiply authored texts need to address coordination and collaboration among contributors. He then proposed his five qualitative measures for readability:
In order to test his measures, Cummings elected to compare the entries in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica on-line concerning William Faulkner's novel Go Down, Moses. However, while he found a “rich” article on the novel on Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica on-line (the freely available version) had no entry, so he defaulted to the William Faulkner page on each site. His results for the Wikipedia article were:
His results for the Encyclopedia Britannica on-line article were:
Based on these results, Cummings concluded that harmony was the only category in which Wikipedia “won.” However, Cummings stated, conducting such an assessment may provide us with a glimpse of what could be accomplished if we distributed qualitative writing assessment in large scale, collaborative writing projects in order to prepare more effective guidelines for the next Wikipedia or the next significant wave of large-scale collaborative writing projects, such as the wiki academy. What currently, limits Wikipedia's success on the readability measures, claimed Cummings, is the “off the shelf” definition of an encyclopedia with which readers come to the site. Instead, Cummings suggested, perhaps we need to look differently at the way Wikipedia generates knowledge and how knowledge production as communal intelligence projects may change the ways in which knowledge is generated in the academy. Question and Answer Q: Take as an example, the Wikipedia article on the genesis of the nickname of an early Hollywood stuntman. There are three potential audiences who might read this article and who might change it: the initial poster(s), the editors, and those seeking information. How can the article effectively address all those audiences? How can one make changes effectively and have them stay? And how might the “coaches” enunciate these concerns to “adoptees”? A: These three audiences have always existed, but have been conflated in traditional encyclopedia entries. Wikipedia may lose coordination, but offers greater breadth. Q: If credibility and voice questions are not raised by Encyclopedia Britannica but Wikipedia raises these questions, does your rubric have a print bias? If it were a conversation, voice and credibility questions might be good, but print smoothes over these various voices and erases the fissures. A: I regarded voice as coherence and harmony as an awareness of agreement and disputes. Perhaps voice is more of an issue for humanities than the sciences. For example, the global warming article is an active site of dispute that acknowledges agreements but also commits to relativism. If “voice” is regarded as fluidity, economy, and efficiency, perhaps it does have a print bias. Q: While you've got your 5 categories, the truth is at the end of the day Wikipedia has a Go Down, Moses article and Britannica doesn't, so in terms of scope and rapid response, is an apples to apples comparison doable? A: I agree. The comparison as it stands goes back to the concept of what an “encyclopedia” is. If we agree that Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, then it's not necessarily a fair comparison. Q: What if you compared Britannica with Wikipedia's more “carefully vetted” off-line version? A: I haven't looked into that yet. Q: When students ask experts to introduce them to the habits of Wikipedia contributors, are they getting anywhere? A: I'm not aware of how that's working. Sometimes the level of expertise may become a kind of “hive mind” mentality. Some might say that Wikipedia needs to become more elitist and to increase its hierarchy. Comment: Can we call the two an apple and an orange and not try to map one on top of the other? Comment: We should realize that Britannica isn't fixed either; it changes too. Remember receiving those World Book supplements? Comment: Might not a lack of polish lead to more questions, and might not that be a good thing? The warts might help us as teachers, and we should introduce Wikipedia as a starting point for research, just like an encyclopedia. Just because a print encyclopedia might be polished, it shouldn't be viewed as an end point to research. Students shouldn't just be parroting the encyclopedia articles. Q: Do you know if more revision leads to worse entries, as McHenry claims? A: I'd like to test that claim. We need longitudinal studies, to have a laboratory for testing collaborative writing practices. Q: In regards to the guild metaphor, you mentioned that all metaphors highlight not just similarities but differences. Where does this metaphor take leave from the thing that it's referring to? A: Well, for one thing, there are different kinds of guilds and they're not geographically or physically located in the same space.
Comments? |