Chiang,+Nick+-+Analysis+and+Reflection

My contribution towards the CCT205 wiki consisted of the Creative Commons page, as well as a section of the WiFi page. The Creative Commons page was originally created as a stub. Throughout the research phase, I added additional relevant sections into the page until I felt that it provided an adequate general overview concerning the Creative Commons licensing system, how it works and its position in current state of affairs. The WiFi page was created by a fellow student, but I felt it was too basic and decided to post a section on issues concerning WiFi usage. I incorporated and elaborated on a pre-existing link that pointed at a recent article about Lakehead University’s unwillingness to implement a campus-wide WiFi network as one of the issues.

Regarding community maintenance, I routinely browsed other topics of interest, and in doing so, provided edits and inter-wiki linking along the way. In my own portions of text, I made sure to link specific keywords to other pages concerning that particular topic, thereby encouraging the hypertextual nature of wikis.

I found the experience of contributing to a constantly growing wiki to be unlike any literary exercise I’ve encountered before. Unlike essays and other written assignments, the immediacy of the edits and the collaborative nature of wikis allowed other people to catch mistakes that I otherwise would not have easily seen. It also allowed other people to add their own insights into a page, which I felt helped to enrich the content by providing multiple points of view concerning a particular topic.

For the most part, the experience was positive. However, there were certain instances in which I could not judge how far to go in the editing process. Because this wiki was not only a collaborative workspace, but was also to be marked, I found that I sometimes limited myself on editing grammatical mistakes in other people’s entries. While maintaining a consistent layout and correcting smaller grammatical mistakes had little consequence, correcting larger mistakes may alter the original message of the author. Referencing and citations were also an issue. If a person did not provide a proper reference and I corrected it, would they be credited or would I?

While I found this wiki experience to be positive, I do not believe it is very suitable as a hand-in assignment at the university level. The boundaries concerning how much of the text are a person’s own is hard to define, and at this level of education, there is a strong emphasis on one’s own writing style and ability. Despite the fact that it is possible to track each person’s changes and edits, it is extremely time consuming and in the end may still not adequately represent a person’s contribution to the wiki. The nature of wikis is focused on collaborative work – the distinction of individual authors is less important in such a space.

For future wiki assignments, perhaps it may be possible to evaluate a class’ work as a whole, instead of for individual students. The wiki could be marked for the overall quality of the articles instead of individual contributions. Another possibility could be to assign groups to specific topics. The group could then share in the collaborative experience while simplifying marking and assessment.