A 21st-century Editing Task: Wikipedia's New York Yankees Page

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This spring, I asked a former student if I could use a unit she developed as a model in my English methods course. After she agreed, I reread her materials. Her handout to guide students' research was as thorough as I remembered, but I noticed something I missed before.

It was the third prohibition of Wikipedia that I had recently seen, sparking questions about what such rules might say about adolescents' opportunities in school to explore collaborative writing in digital environments. I share that thinking here, juxtaposing ideas about editing on Wikipedia with those about the editing task on my state's English language arts test.

Launched in 2001, Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com) is a free online encyclopedia, claiming more than 75,000 contributors working on 10 million articles in 260 languages. Its name combines wiki, a term for a website that Tag Heuer Replica can be edited by anyone with access to it, and encyclopedia. Anyone who signs up for a Wikipedia membership can write or edit new and existing articles on any topic.

Most ...
... talk about Wikipedia has focused on the democratic nature of its authorship and questions of validity and reliability. Although Nature, an online science and medicine resource, found that a sampling of Wikipedia articles on science was nearly as accurate as entries on the same topics from Encyclopedia Brittanica (Giles, 2005), well-publicized incidents such as a prank entry falsely implicating a former USA Today editor (Seigenthaler, 2005) in the Kennedy assassinations have likely contributed to teachers' resistance to the site.

My purpose is not to take a position on the credibility controversy. I understand why teachers are concerned about students citing Wikipedia uncritically, and I understand why tech-savvy teens growing up in an open-source culture might chafe at those concerns. What I find most interesting about Wikipedia, though, is less about whether information on a page can be trusted and more about how the pages are constructed collaboratively online. Teachers' justification for banning or limiting students' use of Wikipedia ("ANYONE can contribute") is also what makes it a powerful example of 21st-century editing. Before I take up that argument, however, let me introduce another point of comparison.

Let's turn to a different example—one that Laura and her teacher likely would not recognize. Editing on Wikipedia is a social, dynamic, and contested process—one requiring the same technical knowledge as the state test but also requiring much more.

A good way to understand Wikipedia editing is to examine one article and the accompanying conversations about its evolution. To illustrate, I'll discuss an article on a topic of personal interest, the New York Yankees baseball team. That piece was recently nominated for status as a "good article"—a designation currently reserved for about 6500 of 3 million pages in English—which means that members are invited to review it using Wikipedia's criteria. My perusal of the discussion and history pages for the Yankees article revealed a wide range of editing moves made by members, including:
1. The correction of a factual error about Roger Maris and the Baseball Hall of Fame
2. A suggestion to delete unsubstantiated material about the 1994 baseball strike
3. A suggestion to explain why an image met standards of fair use
4. Repair of a part of the page that had been vandalized by a fan of another team

Not only did members need to have knowledge of the Yankees and of web publishing, they also needed to employ key social skills to increase the chances of their edits being accepted by others. These skills were best seen when someone violated a Wikipedia convention, such as writing from a neutral point of view, or persisted in advocating for a change after the group had reached consensus. For example, one member wrote to another:

You continuously do not reinsert your edits into this article without any form of adjustment to address legitimate concerns and Tag Heuer Replica Watches questions that have been raised by your very questionable edits, nor do you make any attempt to discuss here.... Please stop. Thank you.

Because of Wikipedia's anonymity, I do not know this member's name, gender, ethnicity, or educational background. What I do know is that s/he has assumed a writerly identity, learned the community's conventions, and engaged in civil but direct conversations with others about improving an online text for a particular purpose. What could be more consistent with the goals of literacy instruction?