Wiki-Reflection

When I first heard about the Wikipedia project, I was excited. I use Wikipedia pretty often and I couldn't wait to see my own work on the site. Then, we had to decide the topic about which we would write. That's when things started getting tricky. Our topic had to be something which was lacking in the Wiki-world and be something about which we could write roughly 10,000 words. So, the class chose Multimodality. Unfortunately, I don't think the class was really thinking about that whole “10,000 words” part. Multimodality is so simple that saying so much about it is bound to be redundant and not as useful as we want. So, when we voted for our topic, I was none too happy about it. Then, we were assigned groups and actually started working on our sections. At that point, everyone else started to realize what I'd been so unhappy about to begin with. We all struggled to find credible sources and relevant information. Writing was the hardest task. Writing a Wikipedia article is so much more difficult than normal writing. Keeping a neutral point of view, stating only facts with no opinions or editorializations, and citing everything seemed to be too big of a task. But, I jumped in and tried my best. I managed to come up with some good information with credible citations, but... I was nowhere near my word count. I was actually only halfway to it. So, after searching and searching and failing to find any more relevant information for my part of our group's section, I just started writing what I knew about multimodality and what I felt was relevant. This got me to my word count, but I figured most of it would get edited out. Ultimately, some of what I wrote on my own ended up getting used in the end product along with my source-produced text. This made me feel a bit better about the writing, but the editing was still to come. Although I consider myself to be somewhat of an editor, looking at this combined article was a nightmare. 20 different voices sang out from this one article, sounding like a maniac's thousand voices speaking in his head. Since people learn different skills I different schools and from different teachers, the spelling and punctuation differed from paragraph to paragraph. Since we all wrote separately, there was a lot of repetition. It was hard to get through. But, eventually, as a class, we did. I've never taken part in such a large-scale collaboration, and to be honest, I wouldn't want to do it again. Although it made for less work on an individual basis, people are so different that it's too difficult to try to make them all the same person; it's too hard to turn 20 voices into 1, and you shouldn't have to. After this experience, I will never write for Wikipedia again. I'll just leave that to the people who the time, patience, and NPOV which it takes to create Wiki-articles.