Wikispaces Project Reflection

The following is a reflection regarding our class collaborative assignment to create a wiki for Citizen Designer. The wiki can be found here.

I understand it is rather cliche to state that I learned a lot from the class project and I'm better because of it, but cliches are cliche for a reason. I learned a lot, but not regarding the sort of thing I think others might have drawn from this project. Power struggles (or the collective ambivalence and/or confusion that leads to a lack of power structures altogether) are nothing new for a social scientist like myself - tracing authority within an organization or group becomes something of a hobby a few semesters in. What I found to be most valuable about this project is how the singular act of sitting down at a computer and going online is not singular at all, and that even when content creation is driven by individuals, content itself, at least in a project like this, must be driven by the group.

That said, in reflection on our project, I see areas in which more defined leadership and organization might have been beneficial. Overall, I think our wiki is quite okay. I'd venture so far as to say the content is rather good. Unfortunately as a class we never seemed to figure out what to do with the Introduction nor the Last Word and I feel that was one area in which greater defined leadership might have been beneficial. I really think one of the reasons that the wiki is presented in a somewhat cohesive manner is because our wiki moderators made the decision to publish an article template and provide tutorials on how to achieve their standard. While not all pages followed that standard, the generally adherence to the template makes the wiki more user friendly. If perhaps the content creators had decided to address the issues of empty pages more directly in and out of class discussions we wouldn't be left with incomplete pages. That said, overall I'm fairly happy with our team effort. I think we were on the right sort of track to figuring everything out, we just didn't do fast enough to fully develop by the deadline.

Second level editing of the articles was both good and bad, to the extent that some articles were not redressed adequately the second time around. By and large, the second level edits brought a lot more to the table regarding format and content. The original posts that I contributed did not receive a great deal of content editing, but formatting and some amount of reorganization is evident. The posts that I revised varied on how much content editing I did; those with significant content edits were done primarily to remove bias and make the concepts a bit easier to understand. I also did a lot of formatting edits to bring the articles to standard with the template released by the wiki moderators and located graphics that pertained to the topic discussed.

Overall, good writing in a wiki is a balance between brevity and a comprehensive discussion, all wrapped up in an easily accessible format. Should we write differently for something that is going to be revised and reused? I think so, yes. If we know what the end goal should be like, then we should write for that end goal from the start. Revisions and such would be an easier process of refinement instead of more involving rewrites. This project, along with our in-class tasks, have changed how I look at Wikipedia. It's not an academic paper, but it holds a lot of data and is the collective effort of a lot of people, many of whom edit content simply to make it easier for the rest of us. It is crowd-sourced curation, and it is dang useful.

What would have made our project better? Bottom line - better communication among all agents. A lot of my complaints could have been largely addressed with better communication, though I am assuming here that such would lead to a leveling of effort across the board and I'm not quite sure it would have worked out like that. Regardless, in retrospect there should have been more discussions about content moderation and we fell short in that respect.