|
Articles Conference Reviews |
200788VieSession 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’s talk was accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation that—as good PowerPoints should—added to, rather than detracted from, his talk by providing relevant imagery rather than a slew of bullet points. Thus Barton began by querying, “What does a wiki look like? If you would make a painting what would it look like?” Perhaps, he started, it would appear like a rhizome. Some people talk about Wikipedia like a Boschian hell—chaotic, deranged, with people doing nasty things to each other. Maybe a wiki looks more like a medieval guild: organized, hierarchical, managed. He joked, “If you want to see this quickly, tell students to go edit Wikipedia and tell everyone it’s part of a class.” Another possible metaphor would be that of a guild, similar to game guilds in MMGORPS like "World of Warcrack". However, Barton was careful to note, these are all just metaphors; wikis are not necessarily just like guilds. Yet the metaphor shows that there are some similarities between guilds and wikis. For example, in a guild hierarchy, one moves from apprentice to journeyman to master and then on to other towns to practice one’s trade. Similarly, in an online game guild hierarchy, an individual begins as a “noob” or newbie, then becomes an officer and finally a master. In the Wikipedia hierarchy, one begins as a registered user, can move up to administrator or sysop, then possibly to bureaucrat or steward. Above them is a board of regents—the developers. In every hierarchy described, an individual must apply to join, prove him or herself reliable, then go higher. Barton closed by asking, “Why guilds?” In other words, why does the metaphor of a guild work particularly well for wikis? The metaphor emphasizes the communal and social aspects rather than then technical (software) issues. It shows how wikis encourage collaboration and community-building. Like guilds, wiki work builds a sense of ownership, shared responsibility (ethics), and duty. A guild metaphor then works better than the metaphor of a palimpsest or rhizome. Bob Cummings, Columbus State University: “Does Collaborative Writing Sacrifice Style? An Inquiry into the Readability of Wikipedia Pages” Cummings started by referencing two (in)famous studies of Wikipedia, Robert McHenry’s “The Faith-based Encyclopedia” and Nature magazine’s study of Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica errors. McHenry (who is not a fan of Wikipedia) argues that the idea of “collaboratively authored documents achieving content and readability is laughable.” McHenry pointed to the Wikipedia entry for Alexander Hamilton, whose birth is disputed (1757 or 1755); he felt that a good encyclopedia should tell readers about the ambiguity. Instead, Wikipedia’s article (according to McHenry) lacks factual coherence—different dates are referenced throughout without discussion of the ambiguity of Hamilton’s birthday. Next, Cummings described a study by the journal Nature which compared Wikipedia against Encyclopedia Britannica. Nature took 42 entries (most on scientific topics), blinded them, and sent them to experts in the field. Per article, Nature found four errors in Wikipedia and three in Encyclopedia Britannica’s online articles on average. While Nature didn’t comment on style, many of the major problems were problems of style. Thus Mark Bell at Ball State University offered a similar study, “The Transformation of the Encyclopedia: A Textual Analysis and Comparison of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia.” This mostly quantitative study looked at entries in both publications about Dwight D. Eisenhower and communism. Bell ran readability, word count, and grammatical tests (counting the numbers of nouns and verbs) on the entries and found no significant differences. However, his sample was a small number of articles. So Cummings described his own study of wiki readability measuring “factual coherence, voice coherence, ethos, form, and harmony.” He looked at the overall entry for William Faulkner in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica online. Wikipedia’s page has categories but doesn’t move in a logical progression; the content within the sections is very uneven. It does not really have voice coherence; the writing doesn’t distract but doesn’t build coherence either. In terms of ethos, for many portions, scholars’ notes are not included. There are significant grammatical errors (form). There is a sense of harmony though there is a lack of direction. In comparison, the Encyclopedia Britannica online has fact coherence, is very integrated, has a clear chronological sequence, a clear voice, and a sense of ethos; the entry recognizes many of the larger ideas, though there’s still more scholarly work needed. The form does not distract and there is harmony. Cummings concluded that this task of assessment needs to be distributed. This is a very small glimpse of what could be accomplished if we distributed qualitative writing assessment in large scale collaborative writing projects. Doing so would allow us to prepare more effective guidelines for the next Wikipedia-type project or the next significant wave of large-scale collaborative writing projects, such as the wiki academy.
Comments? |