Analyzing Wikipedia: Questions for Analysis

Below, you’ll find questions to help you introduce digital rhetorical analysis in your classroom. These questions are tailored to analyzing Wikipedia, but they can be readily transformed for other forms of visual and digital analysis.


Questions for Introducing Wikipedia in the Classroom:
•	What is Wikipedia?
•	If you have used Wikipedia before, how have you used it?
•	Have you ever edited a page of Wikipedia? (If so: what did you change?)
•	What assumptions do people have about Wikipedia? What assumptions do you have?
•	What are the goals of Wikipedia?
•	Why/how is Wikipedia different from any other type of encyclopedia?


Questions for Rhetorical Analysis, Aristotelian and otherwise:
•	Who authors Wikipedia? (How might we define the “authors” of the articles?)
•	How do Wikipedia articles develop a sense of authorial ethos? In other words, how does the site encourage us to trust the accuracy and reliability of the information? 
•	Under what conditions should we question the reliability, accuracy, or verifiability of an article?
•	What do you know about Wikipedia users by perusing the site? What are their expectations?
•	What is the expressed purpose of Wikipedia?
•	What other functions does the site serve? For whom?
•	In what ways is this site effective for its purpose/function? When does it fail, and how can it be improved?


Questions for Analyzing Design: 
•	What does Wikipedia look like? Describe its layout, color schemes, organization, font choices, and so on.
•	What kinds of images appear in Wikipedia? How do these images relate to the text?
•	What types of conventions does the design follow?
•	In what ways does the design of the site seem similar to print reference resources? In what ways is it more like digital resources?


Harder Questions Merging Rhetorical Analysis and Design:
•	How does the site’s design reflect its goals/purpose/function?
•	What kind of ethos is established by the design? (For example, when does it act more like a website and when does it act more like a print resource? What can we learn about its values based on these design choices?) 
•	In what ways can a user interact with a Wikipedia article?
•	What are the implications of this user interaction? (How does the interaction develop power relationships, for example? How does it limit users, and how does it enable them?)