A Breach in My Comfort Zone

First off, I’d like to admit that I wasn’t quite sure how to synthesize these three essays. They seemed too different to me. However, I started thinking about our Wikipedia project and my own reservations with writing for this particular assignment. For the last couple years, a majority of my writing has been for academic purposes. I write for a grade, essentially, and it shapes my discourse. My papers, usually research in nature, are written to be read by one individual in an academic setting. My words are typed and static. Some notes may be scrawled in the margins, but once I get my final draft back, there’s no need to revise the text any longer.

With Wikipedia that is obviously not the case.  In Carra Hood’s “Editing Out Obscenity,” I was particularly taken with the section of “Explanation in Process” where she explains that the nature of Wikipedia entries “take on ‘a neutral point of view’ reached through consensus.” There’s no consensus with my previous writing and very rarely is there a neutral point of view. As a student, I practically hear the words “thesis statement” in my sleep. I do the research on my own and construct my essay, on my own. The thought of someone coming in and beginning to make changes onto my Word document fills me with anxiety. I find that the very act of writing is a personal thing, but Wikipedia is a beast of a different nature. Hood mentions that entries on the site undergo a “comparable improvement over time,” which is something I don’t necessarily get with academic writing. My professor rarely gets to see how I edit my paper from stage to stage and feedback is never immediate. While this phenomenon in Wikipedia is appealing, my main concern is that there will be edits that I don’t agree with or I feel alters the piece to the point where any or all of my personal touches are gone. However, I do realize that Wikipedia isn’t meant to be personal, but neutral.

However, it is entirely possible that I could mean something as neutral, though it gets construed as something else. A particular word choice or implied tone may hinder the neutral point of view I’m trying to be constructing. In W. Ross Winterowd’s “The Rhetoric of Beneficence, Authority, Ethical Commitment, and the Negative,” the concept of intent is an important one. “Simply, we cannot fully interpret a sentence until we can supply an intention for it” (Winterowd, 598). The other editors and contributors of Wikipedia aren’t going to know that our article on multimodality was created as past of a class assignment, or necessarily that we have a group of students constructing it. “The ambiguity of the sentence (which, undoubtedly, a context would eliminate) concerns precisely what I am calling intention” (Winterowd, 598). I think the end goal of this article is to inform, to provide accessible information to the masses. There’s no persuasion or claim-making involved. I’m not sure if something could be gleaned by making other Wikipedians aware of our very own “context,” but then again, I also want to be treated like any other editor. If the article or my portion of it isn’t up to snuff, then it should be cut.

There was a particular quote from Henry Gates’ “Integrating the American Mind” that I loved. “College isn’t kindergarten, and our job isn’t to present a seemingly, dignified, unified front to students. College students are too old to form – we shouldn’t delude ourselves – but they’re not too old to challenge” (Gates, 348). Perhaps this is why writing within Wikipedia is giving me such a panic attack and, of course, I’m being hyperbolic here. I’m not going to start hyperventilating at my computer screen. It’s a challenge. It’s a medium I’ve never worked with before, one that enables other to pick apart my writing as they see fit. It’s completely and utterly foreign to me. I’ve written enough essays and research papers to know the form inside and out. I could very well write them in my sleep and I certainly wish I could. With Wikipedia, I feel very much like I’m being placed in front of a firing squad of sorts, where an anonymous group of people can either riddle me with holes or grant me a pardon.