We finished class today with a serious charge -- we need to better understand what Wikipedia is going to require of us in terms of ethical behavior, fallibility, reciprocity, and rhetorical velocity. Our participating in that environment does mean that we are agreeing to a set of shared guidelines and guiding principles, so we are not jumping in cold. However, even with those guidelines in place, there is still room for us to misunderstand some Wikipedia principles and there is plenty of room for error and harm. Misunderstanding and error and harm are what we want to avoid!
I read your group blog comments after class today, and I think a few groups have come up with excellent definitions of "ethics" or "fallibility" that are specific to writing and editing in that medium. I also think a few groups made some excellent connections among today's readings so as to justify those new definitions for that medium. When we convene on Tuesday, I'll go over the definitions I think are most useful to guide us. There are four things I'll need you to do in advance of Tuesday's class.
Individual: Review
Review Zittrain's chapter and Hood's web-based case study if you hadn't read them that closely for today, mainly because each of them does discuss particular aspects of the Wikipedia community that we'll need to keep in mind.Team: Fleshing of Outline
Visit our Wikipedia Work Space (via Bb) and see that I integrated your outlines into a single draft outline for our article. Several teams put in a tremendous amount of work on their outlines which made my task easier because I understood why you outlined what you did. By class time on Tuesday, I am asking all teams to begin to flesh it out. Instructions are included directly in the Wikipedia Work Space, and at this early stage, don't worry too much about overlap. It is common in Wikipedia articles for some sections to echo each other, since all subtopics work together to create the same intertext. Please do as well as you can and as much as you can; the more your team contributes to our shared outline before Tuesday, the further along we will be as a class. I will ask only that each team color-code their contributions, so that I can keep track of who does what.Individual: Creation of Wikipedia Account
Create a Wikipedia account and establish a username. Go to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy> and think about how anonymous you’d like to be on the internet. Then, go to <Wikipedia English> and from the "Main Page, click "Create Account" (in the top right tab) to register for an editorial account on Wikipedia. Please just keep track of your username so that next week I can collect them all. If you get stuck, <this video> will give you step-by-step instructions for registering an account, once you have chosen a username.Individual/Team: Come Prepared
Please bring your laptops and/or production devices to class on Tuesday so that you can be ready to work. Please also bring -- in print, digital, or electronic (linked) form -- all of the sources that your team has decided would make good contributions for writing our article. Hint: There should be many of them, given the level of detail that our outline contains so far. Remember all of the places you have to draw from in order to gather sources. It wouldn't surprise me if we started with 2 dozen sources and added or subtracted from there. You all did a lot of good brainstorming this week.See you on Tuesday and I'm very much looking forward to it,
-Prof. Graban
