English 375

I want to draw your attention to a new plugin I have enabled on everyone’s blog: a quick link to a wikipedia entry. If you look at my second comment on Lenore’s blog, you will see this functionality put to use. What does it do? When you wrap a term in double brackets the word in the brackets is automatically linked to the wikipedia entry matching this term. This works well for unambiguous terms like enclosure, mercantilism, colonialism, etc. However, it may not work so well for terms that have several competing references or meanings. For example, if trying to link to the wikipedia article about Thomas More’s work Utopia this method will take you to the term/concept utopia not More’s specific text. In this case, one would actually have to get the url and create a link, which you all know how to do.

A few words on wikipedia as a scholarly resource. Wikipedia is a resource that may be useful for defining and introducing general terms and concepts like those I have listed above. Yet, it is important to understand that the encyclopedia articles are written and maintained by a distributed community of authors who have a sense of ownership of certain entries. In fact, anyone can edit a wikipedia article, but keep in mind that wikipedia is not a democracy so if your edits are irrelevant, poorly written, or inaccurate they will be altered or removed by the existing community for that article. The community of authors drives the information of any artcicle, or series of articles, and their contributions are essential wikipedia’s existence. The Wikipedia, by its very “nature” (how do I mean this?), is a collaborative technology that depends upon an active, productive community of users contributors, and editor -without which it would be defunct.

An excellent example of this collaborative, process-driven shaping of knowledge over time that wikipedia represents can be seen in Jon Udell’s analysis of wikipedia (truly a thoughful piece, but there is some brief explicit matrerial so be warned).

As for our purposes, I wanted to draw your attention to two things that pertain to our readings for tomorrow. First, the wikipedia article about Aphra Behn has a warning stating that the the factual accuracy of the article is disputed. It also provides a link to the “talk page” which tracks this dispute, making the questions, contests and arguments plain for world to see and analyze – amazing on many levels. The second thing is that the other author we will be reading for tomorrow, Richard Ligon, does not have a wikipedia article written about him or his work as of yet. I would like our class to get a sense of how a wikipedia article is created and maintained- we will begin this article tomorrow in class as we are discusssing Ligon’s narrative.