Wikis
From MediaStudies
Today's class session is focused on the wiki -- both in general and our class wiki in particular. I want to walk you through a little bit of the history of wikis, a little bit of the theory relating to their uses, and, especially, how this one works, so that you can get up and running with your class wiki project ASAP.
Contents |
History
According to Wikipedia, the first wiki engine, the WikiWikiWeb, was developed in the mid-1990s by Ward Cunningham. Cunningham famously named the technology after the Wiki-Wiki Shuttle that runs between the terminals of Honolulu International Airport, the logic being that "wiki" is ostensibly Hawaiian for "quick."
The key feature of the wiki was thus originally imagined to be that it's a quick way of publishing web-based information; you don't need to create, edit, and upload HTML files, but can rather create and edit new pages directly in a web browser -- thus the "quick" part.
But what's actually turned out to be most important is that the wiki is group-editable; users dispersed geographically can work together on the same document base, and can thus collaborate on vast, easily updatable projects.
Wikipedia
The most significant and extensive wiki project remains, of course, Wikipedia, which, like our wiki, is powered by MediaWiki software. (Other wiki engines include PmWiki, TWiki, and TikiWiki; there are also a number of wiki-hosting services, including PBwiki.)
Wikipedia has, of course, been the subject of tons of controversy, in particular within academic circles, based on a sense that if "just anyone" can edit the information it contains, the information can't be all that reliable. To some extent, these critics have a point: Wikipedia is a good starting place for research, but it's not a good ending point -- for the same reason that you'd never cite an encyclopedia in a formal paper at the college level, you also shouldn't be citing Wikipedia.
Peer-to-Peer Review
That said, though, most wiki software includes a couple of key features that increase the potential reliability of the information that a wiki contains: first, the history page, which allows readers to track the changes that have been made to an article, and second, the discussion page, which allows users to debate and discuss the information that the article contains, or the presentation of that information.
It's for this reason that John Seely Brown has said that if you're only reading the articles on Wikipedia, you're missing the point entirely: unlike with the Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance, in which all you will ever see is the cleaned-up conventional wisdom, or what the editors have decided the key issues and ideas are, on Wikipedia, you can see the process of creating that knowledge, and the key debates that still circulate around those ideas.
For this reason, while a project like Wikipedia doesn't employ traditional methods of peer review, in which experts in a field review one another's work for accuracy and importance prior to publication, it is modeling a new form of what we might think of as "peer-to-peer review," a post-publication process in which work is continually reviewed and revised.
The Wisdom of the Crowds
The significance of such a peer-to-peer review process is, in part, that groups of people, working cooperatively, can often be smarter than the sum of their parts. Recent authors and scholars including James Surowiecki, Cass Sunstein, and Cory Doctorow have explored varying aspects of the processes of collective intelligence.
The Wisdom of this Crowd
So: your collaborative project for the semester, is to build a wiki, one that represents for you the breadth and complexity of the field of media studies as it exists today. What have you studied that's been significant? What have you read? What have you seen? What should no one finish a program in media studies without encountering? The field is too big for any one student, or any one class, or any one textbook, to cover it all; it's going to require all of you in order to begin to represent it.
I've done this with a number of classes in the past, most successfully with my Marxism and Cultural Studies class from a few years back. They began with the syllabus, the authors we read, the texts they wrote, the issues they raised, and created a fairly complex web that represented their understanding of Marxist theory at that point.
Your project is a bit more amorphous, as we're not giving you the same kind of syllabus from which to start. But you might, for instance, go back to some of the classes you've taken on the way here -- your Intro to Media Studies class, Language of Film, Intro to Video Production, Media Theory, and so forth -- and remember who the key thinkers you read then were, what the key ideas were, and start thinking about how to bring those together.
Remember, you don't need to represent everything -- either by making sure that every idea gets an article written about it, or by making sure that any given article is complete. But you do need to fill in holes, figuring out where articles are missing (and adding them), and where articles have information missing (and adding that). Your classmates will do the same.
How to Edit a WIki
First, log in, by clicking on the "log in" link at the top right. You must be logged in in order to contribute to this wiki, both because we want to prevent spambot infestations and because we want you to get credit for your work here. (I'll tell you about your login information in class.)
Then, on any page to which you want to make changes, click the "edit" tab up top. This will bring up an editing window.
Wiki markup language is very simple, simpler even than HTML. I've linked at left to MediaWiki's formatting help page, which will give you some tips. You should also see the links page, for information about how to create links on your pages. (You of course want to create links; that's what makes the project a web.)
Quickly, though: to create a link to another page within our wiki, you can put any word or phrase inside two pairs of square brackets, like this: [[Walter Benjamin]]. The result will look like this: Walter Benjamin.
That link is red (as of right now, on the evening of September 2) because there's no page in the wiki yet created for Walter Benjamin. If you want to create that page, you can click on the link, which will take you directly to the editing pane, so that you can start adding information.
Similarly, if you want to create any other new page, you can search for the title; if there's no page under that title yet, the software will give you the option to create it.
You should fully expect that other members of the class will come along and edit what you've done, and you should plan on editing theirs. Be respectful, though, and if you're making major changes, it's usually a good idea to explain them on the discussion page attached to the article you're editing. (For more information, please see Wikipedia's etiquette page.
How to Grade a Wiki
So how will your work here be graded? In two different ways:
First off, the wiki as a whole will receive a grade, which will be applied to every member of the class. 50% of your grade for the wiki will be determined by this overall class grade.
Secondly, each individual member of the class will receive a grade, based on the effort that you put into the wiki. This will determine the other 50% of your wiki grade. We can track this by looking at your contributions page (every user has one; here's mine).
In order to pass this part of the course, you will each be required to initiate articles stemming from your in-class presentation, and you will also be required to author, contribute to, or help edit ten other pages. Better grades require more and finer participation.
(Incidentally, you all also have user pages, on which you should consider adding some information about yourself, your projects, and your interests. Again, here's mine.)
