I have never created a Wikipedia article before, but since I have been using Wikipedia for years now, I was excited at the prospect of adding to the website for this class assignment. I felt familiar with the writing style and tone of the articles, as each article is strikingly similar in that regard despite the number of them, so I anticipated the research to be the bulk of this project.
Brainstorming about the topic I wanted to cover was the first step. After coming up with ideas, I decided against writing about a South Park episode, or the console game Oblivion, or a concept I learned about in another class, the ‘Loveworld’. I liked the idea of writing about the ‘Loveworld’ because it was just erudite enough to stroke my ego, but I felt that it wasn’t notable enough to have it’s own article. Instead, I decided to write about another term I came across in my African studies class: somatocentricity.
I remember coming across the term in an article we read for class, and after researching it online, I found that not only did the term not have a wikipedia page, but that no other sources used the term as this author had. All I could find were the definitions of the roots of the word: somato and centric. I was surprised, usually the internet is all-knowing, and here it came up short. Learning about this term was almost like a revelation; somatocentricity denotes a social system that I have, unbeknownst to me, been a part of my whole life. I felt that this was an especially noteworthy topic, and seeing as I couldn’t find it easily on the internet, I decided to write my wikipedia article about this concept.
The most important part of any Wikipedia article are the first few lines that define the idea. I spent the most time on those lines than any others, trying to balance defining the term in broad strokes, but being specific enough to be true to the term. I also spent time deciding how many sentences I wanted to include in the first bit; I felt that one sentence was too little to bear the load of what I wanted to express, whereas three sentences were not concise enough. I decided to balance being broad and being specific with using two sentences, the first to outline the term and the second to explain more specifically how the term works.
Of course, writing the first line came after compiling enough sources to support the article. Upon further investigation of some deep internet catacombs, I found a few sources that used the actual word ‘somatocentric’, but the rest of my sources were used to support examples of somatocentric thinking. I felt like I was artificially pushing towards a longer article due to the minimum word limit. I was worried that adding irrelevant information would hurt the chances of it getting past the editors, as wikipedia articles need to be succinct but effective. I toyed around with the format of the article to umbrella the smaller examples under larger issues that stem from somatocentrism. I hope that people expand upon my examples, and provide new categories of their own.
This being the first time I’ve written a wikipedia article, I learned a bunch about the writing process, specifically source retrieval and integration. This was also the first time I’ve written for something as public and popular as wikipedia, so I had to consider how to tweak my writing for this specific discourse community. The potential for collaboration also set this writing experience apart from others, my goal for this piece was to create a ‘good enough’ article to stick around until other people can add to or edit the text. For me, the goal of this type of writing is more altruistic. The end is spreading knowledge to people through an anonymous forum, instead of a personal or capitalistic end of making money.
The other big thing that made this writing experience unique was I felt more motivated to do my best on this assignment than others, as evidenced by my voracious appetite for finding new sources. Usually I consider source retrieval for papers a type of busy work, and I strive to meet the bare minimum. I think part of this attitude was that requirements for other research papers usually called for a vast majority of print sources, and allowed for only one or two web sources. This project encouraged the use of sources with less black-and-white discrimination. I could find all sorts of fascinating scholarly journals to use for my article on reputable websites, instead of trawling through a dinosaur like the library directory to find outdated information in musty books. I believe this speaks to the social aspect this type of writing lends itself to, and the pace of society in general. New studies, ideas, and information bubble up faster now than ever before - breaking news usually breaks online - so wikipedia is a perfect place to both record current knowledge and catalog it’s progress through years, months, or even days.
My enthusiasm to find sources gave me a ton of material to work with, so I also took pleasure in making one-line statements that essentially summarized an article to use for more credibility. Usually I scrape for the minimum amount of sources, then beat them to death for quotes, stretching concepts with liberal ellipses so I can satisfy my teacher’s need for credibility. I remember being told that even if I thought of a concept related to the purpose of a research paper, I needed to find a quote to back it up. I would have to work backwards, keeping in mind my idea and finding sheisty ways to chop up one of my four sources to ‘support’ my idea. I remember certain instances getting away with source integration manslaughter, if my teachers took the time to see the context of quotes I used, they would realize it had nothing to do with my idea. I felt like I was ‘cheating’ by connecting my idea with bits of words from dusty tomes on shaky grounds, but I was acting under the construct that writers don’t have credibility unless they’ve been published.
I avoided quoting altogether in this article for a few reasons. In general, I feel that quotes should be used sparingly while paraphrases should make up the bulk of source integration. Quotes are very effective if you want to preserve the aesthetic beauty of a phrase, or if you need to connect people to their words as to compare and contrast with other peoples words. Otherwise, if you’re trying to express in broad strokes a concept, or if you want to be concise, paraphrasing works just fine. I also feel that the nature of wikipedia lends itself to annotated paraphrases, especially this article, which was a broad strokes type deal. I could summarize an article and provide a link to the original source, so if a reader felt uneasy or disagreed with the statement, they could read the article themselves.
I also didn’t include quotes because I felt it would interfere with the tone of the article. The act of quoting, to me, seems like a slight against objectivity and impartiality. Quotes are used to great effect in persuasive or argumentative pieces, but you would never see them in something like Encyclopedia Britannica (unless it’s an article about a person), which uses the same neutral, unbiased tone encouraged by wikipedia founders.
Intertextuality takes a pleasing form in wikipedia. I feel shady about quotes because I don’t know the context, but with wikipedia you can find the original article with supreme ease and figure it out yourself. Quotes in books are more likely to slip under the radar of being questioned, as it takes much more effort to physically find the quote in a text. I figured this out as a high school student trying to BS quotes into my papers, so I must figure that people smarter than me have done the same thing in sneakier ways (maybe even in the books I used for my BS!). Wikipedia does not allow sneakiness, as checking up on the source is just a click away.
To conclude, I learned a few key concepts that I hadn’t considered before writing this article. I learned that writing for a discourse community affects the goals a writer considers before writing; for example, wikipedia articles don’t “[become] “solid”... with the final casting - publication”, because these articles are never published, they are always in flux (Tomlinson 255). Knowing people can edit your article distances yourself as an individual from your work, allowing you to be more truthful and altruistic about the knowledge you want people to learn about. In this community you don’t worry about your “shitty first draft”, because in this sense it’s the whole world’s shitty first draft (Lamott 301). Motivation from this realization caused me to search for a bunch of sources, where I learned how to usefully and legitimately use sources, instead of backwards integrating it into my paper (as I wrote this line I combed this thing to see where I could fit some in... I didn’t get very far). Wikipedia is changing how knowledge is created, edited, accessed, cataloged, and referenced in their corner of the internet that grows every day. I believe these changes are for the better. If anything, they work to break down many constructs surrounding “traditional” ways of referencing and cataloging knowledge born out of a world having to deal with physical text.
Works Cited
Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” Writing about Writing. 1st ed. Wardle, Elizabeth and Downs, Doug, eds. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 301-304. Print.
Tomlinson, Barbara. “Tuning, Tying, and Training Texts.” Writing about Writing. 1st ed. Wardle, Elizabeth and Downs, Doug, eds. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 252-265. Print.
