Finding New Appreciation

Dare I say it, but I found this assignment surprisingly enjoyable. At first, I was a little wary of editing in Wikipedia. As a new editor, I didn’t want to do the wrong thing. While I know the process is reversible, what I do is still available for people to see in past revisions. If I edited a page and then chose to revert back to an earlier revision, I feel like that would be admitting failure on my part, so I wanted to be extremely cautious with the changes I made. I think the made reasoning for this is best explained in Carra Leah Hood’s “Editing out Obscenity,” in which she says “This inversion of writing objectives – texts forever in process instead of in progress toward a final, complete version – relocation of the space in which process occurs – public instead of private space – and deflation of the cultural value assigned to the final product, informs text construction not only in Wikipedia entries but also in other digital writing environments” (“Explanation in Process,” Hood). Most notably, it’s the public space that made me hesitant to cut and edit. I wanted to make sensible, intelligent changes, something that wouldn’t spark a debate, though I wound up classifying my edit as major rather than minor, since I did add and change some content.

The article I chose to edit was on Mario Santana, found through Wikipedia’s portal page. It was an orphan article and required some links to be added. I wound up doing so, mainly creating internal links to universities and places mentioned. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find pages for any of the awards Santana had won. Upon looking through the references/citations, I noticed his faculty page suffered from link rot, so I found his updated page on the same website. Looking it over, I noticed that he no longer held the positions that were noted in the article. Doing some further research, I found a blog post from the Department of the Humanities website at the University of Chicago that announced that he was serving in a new position. I added those to the “lead” and put an inline citation for it. I opted not to use the template as it was a blog post and found it easier to just follow the format of the previous editor. I also edited the table on the side to include his former positions, as I felt they are important to the article, but I felt noting his current positions was equally as important. Articles, no matter how small, especially on living persons, need to be checked often and updated. In Santana’s case, the article was providing information that was no longer true, which I find to be a startling concept for those turning to Wikipedia to get their information.

Since the second part didn’t require editing in the Wikipedia space, I was more liberal with my edit. I felt more comfortable, essentially gutting another person’s piece in the privacy and comfort of my own Word document. I chose an article on artist Anna Banana in the copy edit section from April 2012. Just looking at the article, I could tell it was a train wreck. Most of the grammar and spelling was all right. However, the main problems I found were that of concision and redundancy.

In Lauren Kessler and Duncan McDonald’s When Words Collide, their chapter on clarity and cohesion says, “imprecision, clutter, misplaced phrases and murky construction have no place in good writing” (138). It seems easy to write this off because it’s just Wikipedia and not some great work of literature, but the nature of which the site is accessed is what’s most important. Wikipedia serves to inform millions of visitors. If the content doesn’t exist, is false, or difficult to navigate, that’s one person that turns away from the potential of learning something new, still confused about a particular topic or where to begin for a paper. But multiply that one by a million and the problem isn’t as easy to brush off. If Wikipedia weren’t so successful and thorough at creating and editing, it would have died out a long time ago.

Though there was a lot to edit on Anna Banana, I’ll address a couple of my main problems. I found that link redundancy or repetition was an issue. Usually, another article is linked to once, not every time the word shows up. As a reader, when I see a hyperlink to another article, I treat it as though the editor is defining the word or putting the definition into context of the current article. Repeated linking of the same word, say ‘Vancouver,” was really distracting to me as a reader. I also wondered why the editor or creator chose to link to some articles, but not others. Some internal links were for minor things that I didn’t see having any real relevance to the article. Does “perforated” really need to be linked?

Odd organization tended to be equally distracting, if not more. Every section on Anna’s artwork included “Citations” subheads, though I felt that title was misleading. The content in them was more like published reviews on her work. I’m torn about whether to just create an entire section for all reviews pertaining to her work. Most of them needed citations and I think seeing the context and what they’re actually referring to would have been helpful to make that decision.

According to Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb’s Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace, the first principle of concision is to “delete words that mean little or nothing” (58). In this case, I deleted entire sections, specifically the one about her grants. I just don’t understand how it’s pertinent information that she received a grant “to travel.” There wasn’t any in-depth detail about why she needed it to travel and where she was going. I also didn’t understand how it related to her as a whole.

Part of me found it refreshing to see unpolished articles and I’m legitimately amazed that people have put so much time and effort into this entire project, especially when they aren’t really receiving anything in return. They’re simply doing this because they want to and I can understand why. I’ve checked up on my edits to Santana’s article and there’s a feeling of pride seeing the changes I’ve made still on the page. I feel like I’ve helped, even just a little bit to an article that may never be read. It’s a good feeling, one that serves as it’s own reward.

Works Cited

Hood, Cara Leah. “Editing Out Obscenity: Wikipedia and Writing Pedagogy.” 2008. http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/wiki_hood/index.html.

Kessler, Lauren and Duncan McDonald. When Words Collide, 8th Ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2012.

Williams, Joseph and Gregory Colomb. Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace, 4^th Ed. United States: Longman, 2012.