- posts are regularly monitored and removed (sometimes in under two minutes)
- many edits are simply reversions to the original post - there does not seem to be much thought put into understanding and assimilating new users' contributions
- what is valued as important to the entry (what stays posted) does not always make sense or represent an in-depth (encyclopedic) explortion of subject material (eg the contradiction in the pro-ana post, the form of the self-publishing post, the one-sideness of the history of travel blogging) => wikipedia is as much a social experience as a scholarly one
- editors are sometimes rude, pedantic and otherwise off-putting (the comment about using periods at the end of sentences
- there is a definite a hierarchy - where some individuals have the power to remove posts and "ban" individuals who re-post their posts without negotiating a consensus
- getting your post to stay up on wikipedia is not easy => even though this is supposed to be a democratic, open process there are gatekeepers who are bent on keeping some kinds of information out
- there is an ideology that decides what will be posted and what will not I'm thinking of Angela's experience); this ideology goes beyond the npov and not a dictionary and etc. rules listed in "what wikipedia is not" list
- the moderators/editors remove edits based on their understanding of/perspective on the material - not necessarily on its worth ( I'm thinking of James', Ricky's and Jennifer's experiences)
- pages with high traffic are harder to stay posted on than pages with low traffic (the eBay entry was the most vulnerable in this respect)
-some editors spend 8-hour days on wikipedia
- the validity of wikipedia entries needs to be taken with a grain of salt
We also had a discussion of how publishing on wikipedia compares to print publishing - both in terms of validity and possibilities for new authors to make it into print. I would like to read some more of your reflections on this on your blogs. I was surprised at how difficult it was for contributors with good intentions to make edits. I was also surprised how un-welcoming the editors you dealt with were.
For class Wednesday:
We did not get to your presentations on your layouts for your web essays today - so you are going to present them on Wednesday - so we are revising the schedule: do the FrontPage tutorial on your home computer or in one of the computer labs here at Kean (let me and I will get you a place to work). The site for the tutorial is:
http://office.microsoft.com/training/training.aspx?AssetID=RC061276411033
Come to class with any questions - about how to use FrontPage - and Ryan and/or I will try to work through them with you.
We will spend most of the class talking about your layouts.
I will be reading your blog entries over the weekend. Your next entry, Blog 9, due on Monday, will be an entry where you are developing writing for your web essay. At this point you should be doing some in-depth analysis on a particular aspect of your topic.
-
No comments:
Post a Comment