How fitting that Weinberger talks about Wikipedia after I decide to write my multimedia letter on wiki's.
I think that Weinberger gave me a lot of interesting negative things to speak about within my letter. By this I mean what not to use a wiki for. My favorite quote from the reading had to be when Robert McHenry said:
"The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him."
Now obviously McHenry is a bit bias, since he is editor in chief of Encyclopedia Britannica, but I thought that this was a beautiful way to outline what you could find when researching with Wikipedia. I couldn't help but imagine being in a bathroom stall with this quote, thinking of all of the writing you see on the walls. What Weinberger is saying with this is that at a site such as Britannica, or a news site like NY Times, there are people in charge of getting every little fact straight, while at Wikipedia anyone is capable of posting anything online. "Its authors need not have any credentials at all. In fact, the authors don't even have to have a name" (Weinberger 134). This could be beneficial in many ways, but the negative aspects of the site stick out as well, as it develops an anonymous screen to the reader. Every one knows that people are more willing to tell a rumor/lie if they know that their name wont be attached to it.
The idea of developing neutrality through Wikipedia posts seems like a bit of a stretch to me. In most cases, people wont want to change their minds - it's just what people do. In most cases I feel as if you would have to post both sides of something in order to produce a NPOV (neutral point of view). Is that really considered neutral, or is that just posting both sides to make everyone happy?
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Since we're critiquing each other today, I have to point out that you're missing the post on Williams. Accordingly, I have to place you in the incomplete category of the rubric. Aside from that I'd put you somewhere around 3.5 - you have a clear grasp of the material, and your examples are good when you have them, but you didn't include examples in all of your posts, so I can't go all the way up to a 4.
ReplyDeleteI agree about the issues with NPOV - it seems like the goal is to make a historical record that everyone can agree on, with the understanding that it's going to be a rocky back-and-forth in the mean time. The trouble with historical records that everyone can agree on is they're sanitized. Sure, they'll be useful to future historians, but isn't the idea of a historian to take all the information they can find and put together a sanitized compilation?
I'm not sure they should call it neutrality because when we think of the definition of the word, we think both sides are in agreement. But that's not necessarily the case here, instead an article is neutral when people have stopped changing it. This doesn't mean that both sides are happy or that one way is right and the other way is wrong. Maybe it means somebody got sick of arguing and just gave up. Or maybe one person had more "authority" than the other and so his way "won."
ReplyDeleteI guess here is where I'm supposed to comment on all of your posts? Well, you have almost all of the posts (I think there are 9 and you have 8 I believe). If you had all of them, I think I would put you on the grading rubric somewhere between "are completed" and "contains interesting examples and show command of the reading completed." You have examples for some of your posts, but not all of them.
I think that it is considered neutral in the sense that you're not cramming your opinion down your readers throat. On the other hand you could state your opinion in an unbais way and leave it up to your readers to search out the other side of the argument if you want.
ReplyDeleteWhat I'm really curios about is how really "unclean" Wikipedia is. Since the majority of our generation, at least, is using wikipedia as a viable source, why not test its credibility? I'm curious to know if unreliable wikipedia's information is. Can you (or the general you that is questioning wikipedia) go out, pick an article (pick several articles) and then compare what you find to what other websites are saying? and also I think it would be wise to compare the wikipedia articles to Britianic, since it is claiming to be superior in intelligence, or at least credibility. What if the article on Wikipedia is in reality a general paraphrasing of the article in Britianica? I've had this happen to me before =)
overall it looks like most, if not all of your post are up and readable. also the work on your website it very nice. Sorry I can't help with your questions at all.
I was actually thinking of the wiki we created last semester when I was reading this! Hopefully it won't become a "public restroom"...
ReplyDeleteI think you're right, honestly I think the only people who WOULD wade through the wikipedia posts are those who already have strong (and probably biased) opinions. Others will just take the information they're presented with at face value ("that's the way it is") or move on to a more credible source.
Your posts all seem to be here, and they're thorough and well thought out.
I felt that you did very good job with connecting your material to that of Weinberger's. I think that one has to remain neutral when trying to get their opinions across, because they ARE trying to appeal to both sides of the coin. Wikipedia's all about getting people involved, but there should always be a fine line between what should be considered fact and what's complete bull. I think that you did a nice job asking questions about what should matter more at the end of it. I believe that you did a nice job overall talking about this section alone, but you should go beyond this so you can let others know what else was your favorite part about the reading. Other than this, keep it up.
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