Wikipedia Process

In this last sphere we split into groups and wrote a section of a wikipedia article to later be posted on the famous webpage. My group was in charge of the section titled 'Mediums'. It was our responsibility reference and define the many different mediums used in public sphere writing. So we used the constructed outline and filled in the the necessary information that we saw fit for out section of the article to seamlessly fit into the page as a whole.

Taking Kittrain's lead, we jumped into the sandbox and and began conducting what we believed to be the best course for the Mediums section. Using multiple texts from class and even outside sources from other classes we sculpted the different aspects involved in Mediums: Print and Digital. We took the two and expanded both giving examples of both sections.

In the Print section we discussed the use of Peer reviewed journals and magazines. This is where we folded the group constructing Types into our section. They had made the sections of Magazine, Peer Reviewed Journals and Letters and Editorials. We folded those into the Print section. In the Digital Section we focused mainly on Blogs, Hypermediation, and Multimodality.

It was a little more difficult going from a 3 person group to a 6 person group with everyone suggesting their own ideas for just one section of the entire article. The final workshop made it easier to talk to the group as a whole and work out the problems associated with the section. I think at the end of the day we had a pretty solid section compared to the week before when the two groups were still working separate.

I found it much easier to work on the article when not in the chaos of the classroom. It was much harder to edit and change things when someone is going behind you and changing them back. In Kittrain's essay on the lessons of wikipedia he talks about Wikipedia encouraging us to be bold, and to take the plunge. It was nerve wracking at first, but once it as under way, it came very easy to do.

-D