Hello, Everyone:
As you are working in your Google Drive spaces with your writing teams, please do keep in mind that -- in some cases -- the best sources you could be drawing from are the sources you have already read and mastered for the class. In other words, take this is an opportunity to look again at those sources that already reflect what you think to be true about public-sphere writing, since our main prerogative as Wikipedia editors is to construct an article that is as informative as possible. We do not need to convince anyone of the existence of the topic; rather, we are pointing to the topic's presence and usage (already) in what we have been studying. (And this would be true no matter what our chosen topic.)
By the beginning of class time on Thursday, your group will need have a full and completed draft of your section in the group's wikipedia workspace. After spending some time considering the fallibility of some of Wikipedia's existing articles, we'll be examining our article -- section by section -- for fallibility and neutral-point-of-view. Most significantly, we'll spend time considering whether there is too much overlap between sections and/or too little coherence and cohesion throughout the whole piece.
Our goal by the end of the class will be to have made final content decisions about what stays in what section, what needs to be moved around, and what might go altogether. In other words, this is the time when our individual group ethos will need to fold more broadly into a whole class ethos. That said, each group should expect to have some part of their section challenged, rethought, reorganized, and even renegotiated.
If we can do that successfully, then we have one more week to complete the next step, which is for each group to get their section completely finalized according to a set of shared
editing criteria. In the last few days of class, we will then work on
smoothing over the whole (but more on that, later, since that involves a couple of steps I'll be completing on our behalf).
Please bring to class -- or otherwise have access to in class -- the sources you have used to compose your section of the article. We have a lot to get accomplished in our 75 minutes. Please also bring your assignment sheet (just for reference).
See you on Thursday, if not before,
-Prof. Graban
