What Being a Mindful Citizen Critic Means in Practice
Before this assignment, I had never edited a Wikipedia article before. I was unaware of how easy it is and how openly available Wikipedia is to allow anyone to edit an article, but I was also unaware of the many standards and responsibilities that come with editing for Wikipedia. Through years and years of school I would often use Wikipedia as a quick reference to look something up, but never in formal contexts as I was always taught how unreliable Wikipedia is. After this assignment, I would no longer necessarily say that this claim is true. My beliefs about this have changed because of the Wikipedia trusted system of being a mindful citizen critic when working in the Wikipedia sandbox. With the lessened reward and punishment system of Wikipedia, the result is, “…basic order maintained, as people choose to respect particular limits in the absence of enforcement” (Zittrain 128). Wikipedia is an open source publication that anyone can access and edit; however, the standards and monitoring in place do hold weight for Wikipedians to avoid bias and provide accurate information to Wikipedia consumers.
This was an interesting assignment in that the entire class contributed and worked together, which I found to be the most difficult and rewarding part of completing the article. Creating one single article with over 20 individual contributors all working in the same room created a lot of issues from some being upset that their section had been changed or entire sections being deleted on accident. Corbett and Eberly stress the importance of working together in this kind of sandbox environment in “Becoming a Citizen Critic” when they say, “In a democracy, rhetoric as the actualizer of potential depends on citizens who are able to imagine themselves as agents of action, rather than just spectators or consumers” (Corbett and Eberly 131). This was an important learning process, as the class learned how to work as a democracy, making changes together and bringing each individual section into conversation with the article as a whole. Learning how to work together in Wikipedia’s sandbox environment brought in overarching class principles on how to be a citizen critic and trust in each other’s work, which is discussed in “Becoming a Citizen Critic”: “Citizen criticism requires some sense of faith in whatever public or community is being addressed” (Corbett and Eberly 122).
Responsibility played a large part in being one individual writer for this collaborative article. This required utilizing Wikipedia’s regulations in order to provide accurate and unbiased information, while at the same time trusting the editing system of Wikipedia in knowing that mistakes can be fixed, and the Wikipedia network, in this case being our classmates, would be helping to provide validity for our work. An open source system of this sort works because, “When we face heavy regulation, we see and shape our behavior more in relation to reward and punishment by an arbitrary external authority, than because of a commitment to the kind of world our actions can help bring about” (Zittrain 128). By not being highly regulated and punished for minor and unintentional discrepancies, Wikipedians strive to uphold the standards and ethics of open source publications for their consumers. This is largely because of Wikipedia’s editing system, which allows that, “If any of the posted material is objectionable or inaccurate, people can either ignore it, [or] request for it to be taken down…” (Zittrain 131). A system similar to this is exactly what took place in our large editing workshops in class, with everyone working together to question material when necessary or remove extraneous information for the better of the article as a whole.
One final concept that I gained from this assignment was a more complex but concrete understanding of rhetorical velocity. In “Rhetorical Velocity and Copyright: A Case Study on Strategies of Rhetorical Delivery,” rhetorical velocity is defined as, “a strategic concept of delivery in which a rhetor theorizes the possibilities for the recomposition of a text based on how s/he anticipates how the text might later be used” (Ridolfo and Rife 229). My understanding of rhetorical velocity came from the way I adapted my writing in the context of a Wikipedia article. This required me to provide accurate and unbiased information, in a matter of fact way, relying heavily on sources while using little quotation, and citing with footnotes. My typical academic writing, including the majority of my writing in this class, relies more on quotation and manipulating quotations to the arguments specific to an assignment. Ridolfo and Rife touch on the importance of how Wikipedia operates as a commons: “When rhetorical velocity and copyright converge, one has to define the commons, because designing documents or discourse to be appropriated ultimately means placing creations in the commons, which is a place reliant on the appropriation of things with no owners (i.e. orphaned work) and of things previously owned (as in the case of human bones)” (Ridolfo and Rife 238). Respecting the commons environment is essential to being a Wikipedia editor because constructing an article in the Wikipedia sandbox relies so heavily on appropriating information and accurately conveying that information to one specific topic or article. Appropriation was another large overarching theme of the class that we were able to further understand because, “…cultural properties – unlike natural resources – are not exhaustible, and in fact depend upon appropriation to survive” (Ridolfo and Rife 238). This was true in our collaborative article as we appropriated many class sources as well as additional outside sources to provide information pertinent to our article topic for Wikipedia consumers to utilize in the future.
Overall, editing a Wikipedia article for the first time was a large learning process that brought together several overarching themes from the class, ultimately giving me a deeper understanding of what rhetorical velocity and being a mindful citizen critic really mean.
Corbett, Edward P.J., and Rosa A. Eberly. “Becoming a Citizen Critic: Where Rhetoric
Meets the Road.” The Elements of Reading. 121-138. Web.
Ridolfo, Jim and Martine Courant Rife. “Rhetorical Velocity and Copyright: A Case
Study on Strategies of Rhetorical Delivery.” 223-243. Web.
Zittrain, Jonathon L. “Lessons of Wikipedia.” 127-295. Web.
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