Becoming a Wikipedian

             After completing my first editing task on Wikipedia, I found that it is kind of nerve-racking to edit someone else’s semi-established piece of work in such a public space. It is important to keep in mind that Wikipedia is a collaborative website and multiple people have already come along and made changes to every article on the site. The article I chose to revise was about anonymous web-browsing and although I know little about this subject, I chose it to make minor edits; which Wikipedia considers to be “typo corrections, formatting and presentation changes, rearranging text…” (Wikipedia). In other words, I corrected some simple errors and eliminated some unnecessary sentence fragments. In my opinion, I just polished up an article that was a little rusty. In chapter six of his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, “Lessons of Wikipedia,“ Jonathan Zittrain mentions that "Wikipedia--- with the cooperation of many Wikipedians---has developed a system of self-governance that has many indicia of the rule of law without heavy reliance on outside authority or boundary” (Zittrain 143). Becoming an official Wikipedian and experiencing my first editing task, I can fully understand the aspect of “self-governance” within Wikipedia that Zittrain discusses. With guidelines and features such as the “edit summary” box, Wikipedians are free to make edits without any official authority. As long as every edit made is justified in the edit summary section and abides by the guidelines, Wikipedia is able to maintain a system of self-governance.

            After becoming a Wikipedian, I realize the full extent to the problems people have with Wikipedia. While in the editing section, there is liberty to literally change anything on the article. However, after reading so much about Wikipedia, I know for a fact that large erasures of sections, vandalism, and biased statements are watched heavily by robots, administrators, and loyal Wikipedians. If there is one thing I learned about Wikipedia, it’s that it involves a heavy use of intertextuality. According to James E. Porter, in his article “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community,” “’Examining texts ‘intertextually’ means looking for ‘traces,’ the bits and pieces of Text which writers or speakers borrow and sew together to create new discourse” (Porter 34). Wikipedia, being a collaborative entity, is nothing but fragments of information sewn together with the goal of creating new discourse. Without the pre-existing information needed to create well-developed articles, Wikipedia would not exist.

Ultimately, I have learned that Wikipedia is defined by two things: collaboration and intertextuality. Just as Wikipedia relies on intertextuality for its existence, it also relies on the collaboration of its Wikipedians to put those fragments of information together in a cohesive manner. The collaborative aspect of Wikipedia is what allows such a broad spectrum of information to become available at such a rapid rate. All in all, becoming an official Wikipedian has caused me to realize how Wikipedia really functions as a “sandbox.” Just as children collaborate and play “nice” in a sandbox, Wikipedians collaborate and respect one another’s opinions, additions, and edits to articles. After stepping into the realm of Wikipedia and becoming a Wikipedian by making some minor edits, I am ready to play in the sandbox and make worthy additions to my Advanced Writing and Editing class' Wikipedia article on public sphere writing!