Working within the Wikipedia Community has been a very
challenging experience in the past couple of weeks. When are our article is launched
for the public to see I hope it proves to be a rewarding experience. It is
through working in the Wikipedia community I have seen our class discussions
come alive. Found within my analysis of working on the project I plan to show
how our class discussions came alive for me while working on the project.
When it was told to me that we were going to be
working in Wikipedia I was not completely for the task because through my whole
careers English major I was told Wikipedia was a bad place. Using sources from Wikipedia was like committing
a writing sin and would lead to automatic loss of points. The ironic thing
about the situation is even though I would dare not use Wikipedia in my paper
directly I would still use it as a reference point for my work. It is easier to
understand concepts in Wikipedia at times than it is to goggle it. Hoods article Editing Out Obscenity: Wikipedia and Writing Pedagogy helped to change my mind
about this project. When were taught writing as freshman in college our writing
is taught to us as a final product. Hood was right when she said, “In this
pedagogy, the final product continues to retain value, however; it represents
the end of process and of teachable writing skills, …”. (Hood). No one’s
writing comes to a stand still after it’s done. Writing is an ever-evolving product
and using Wikipedia, as a tool in the writing classroom instead of discouraging
it all together can be a helpful source for writing teachers.
Working
within the Wikipedia Community I better built my skills as a writer than
working as an individual unto myself. As Hood said in her article I encountered
“Evaluation of writing occurs immediately and as an ongoing activity throughout
the process of text construction; in addition, peer review, revision, and
collaboration, by an engaged and global audience.” (Hood) Before I could bring
my work to my group mates I had to judge my work first then bring it to my
group so that we could evaluate it together. The evaluation didn’t stop there,
I had to go back and revaluate more work several more times. Revision and
Collaboration were all mixed into the evaluation process.
It was through
this process that I saw my rhetorical velocity was crucial. In Jim
Ridolfo and Martine Rife article Rhetorical Velocity and Copyright: A Case
Study on Strategies of Rhetorical Delivery they said “Rhetorical
velocity is a strategic concept of delivery in which a rhetoric theorizes the
possibilities for the recomposition of a text” (Ridolfo and Rife 229). When
writing for my project I had to think about if someone was linked to my section
in another article would my sections be able to stand apart but, blend in our
Wikipedia article as a whole. I look forward to how my writing will
evolve in the article.
Works Cited
Hood, Cara Leah. “Editing Out Obscenity: Wikipedia
and Writing Pedagogy.” 2008. Web. http://www
.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/wiki_hood/index.html.
Ridolfo, Jim, and Martine Courant Rife.
“Rhetorical Velocity and Copyright: A Case Study on Strategies of Rhetorical
Delivery.” Copy(write): Intellectual Property in the Writing Classroom.
Ed. Martine Courant Rife, Shaun Slattery, and Dànielle Nicole De Voss. Fort
Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor P, 2011. Web. http://wac.colostate.edu/books/copywrite/.
