This afternoon I added my expert knowledge to a pool of collective intelligence and became an encyclopedic author. . . So what did you get up to today?
In reality my expert knowledge concerned a character in a British rom/com TV show and my claims to encyclopedic authorship actually meant that I added a few words to a topic in Wikipedia. While Wikipedia is advertised as an "encyclopedia" it is also advertised as the one that "anyone can edit"
(Welcome to Wikipedia 2012) - no credentials required, no university degrees needed, no expertise - you don't even need to give your name, so hold your applause people.
In fact altering information on Wikipedia is surprisingly easy -after reading a few instructions on the
Tutorial/Editing page I was ready to bestow my head full of random facts on a world wide audience. The problem I found was not in the web publishing (wikis by design are user friendly - utilising a combination of wysiwyg software and a few basic commands known as wikitext enables budding authors like myself publish on line without knowledge of HTML
(Leaver 2011)). The problem was with finding a topic that nobody else had already written about.
So why do people volunteer their time to write wikipedia posts in the first place? (when they arent required to do so for university).
A report on
The Quality of Open Source Production states that who people that contribute Wikipedia do so in different ways. Some become members and publish under their names or pseudonyms and do so in order to:
- contribute to a community,
- to gain status within the community by publishing quality information often
Others contribute anonymously, on rare occasion and do so in order to:
- part with some expert knowledge in a particular field
- fix errors
(Anthony, Smith, and Williamson 2007)
Therefore the combination of experts, error fixers and "people who like to write encyclopedias for the fun"
(TEDGlobal 2006) means that Wikipedia is on par with your traditionally and "expertly" authored encyclopedia such as Encyclopedia Britannica. Neither are infallible, nor 100% correct but one is not more correct than the other despite the differences in the way information is collected. Both operate under a system of referencing sources which should be substantiated before using in an academic context such as an essay
(Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia 2012).
As status within the encyclopedic writers world was not something Ive ever really dreamt about at night, and my current incarnation as a student renders me (for now) expertise-less (in the academic sense) ... my task was to search for errors or information gaps in a very niche (some would say trivial) market that I knew allot about .. TV. Study in a previous university unit had me set up a blog about television show of which I now know every detail - from plot to character development to script.
Gavin and Stacey it seems, is my area of expertise.
I found a topic about one of the characters
(Nessa Jenkins) that was missing a bit of information and added the following text to
Romantic links part of the biography section:
"Nigel Havers, Mohamed Al-Fayed (who tried to set her up with his son), and two of Gladys Knights Pips (whom she woke up in bed with in Vegas)[1]"
Wikipedia requires that all info is verifiable and therefore should be referenced back to a "reliable source" (
Wikipedia:Verifiability 2012). This is where a little more experimentation began, as I referenced my entry back to the blog I created for the assignment (
Nessa's A-Z) and wondered if it would be good enough as an encyclopedic reference.
The only thing to do now was to wait and see if any changes would be made to my entry. As Wikipedia posts can be changed by anyone it was possible that the information I had added to the wiki would deleted or altered in some way. People passionate about certain topics can add wikipedia posts to watch lists and monitor the information that's added, changing it within seconds if they see fit. These changes can be viewed via the
View History tab which I checked religiously over the course of the day with no changes made.
Four days later I revisited the page to find the information I added was still in tact and was feeling pretty smug that my little piece of trivial information was being accepted by the wikipedian Gavin and Stacey loving community. This was until I tested the link I added to the reference section, (the one that pointed back to my blog) and found it was not working. I had entered the address incorrectly. So it seems I was mistaken when I thought I had been accepted into the wikipedian authorship community and it was more the case that the info that I added has not been checked. No body picked up the broken link, therefore nobody is watching the Nessa Jenkins wikipedian entry... The cloud of smugness lifted... Lucky I didn't care about it anyway . . .
Anthony, D., S. W. Smith, and T. Williamson. 2007. The Quality of Open Source Production:
TEDGlobal. 2006. Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia. In TED Talks. online video. TED Ideas Worth Spreading.
