Our own wikis on PBWorks

Before delving into Wikipedia itself, we started off our Wikiality unit by creating our own wikispaces on a website called PBWorks. These were public, so in theory anyone could edit them, but in practice only the people in our class did. That still made for much more changes than I would've expected!

To create the wiki itself, I worked with Ha Young and Brooke. This was surprisingly easy: we just went to PB Works, entered my e-mail adress and a password. After that we were taken to another page which asked us how we wished to name our new wiki, and tadum - we had our own workspace. Of course, it was empty, but it was still surprising how little time it took to create one. Absolutely anyone can become the administrator of one, there's no identity check or moderation. In a way that is great because it allows anyone to enrich the web; on the other hand, there's something powerful about being anonymous on the internet.

After that, we copied the script of my fictional podcast on the wiki and let people change it, and put a little note at the top that asked if anyone could help us "improve the script"... to be honest, the edits weren't really aimed at making our script better but more at having fun. Here are a few of the not-so-helpful changes that were made (whatever is crossed was removed and whatever is in green was added):


Changes in reading
Name: Dorthella
Age: 15
Gender: Girl old enough
Cultural background: Dorthella lived in England from the time she was born to her twelfth birthday, after which she moved abroad to Mongolia. Culturally, she considers herself British, but she has travelled a lot and would like to believe she has an “international culture.” She is the second eldest in a family of three. Her little sister is turning nine and her older brother is in his sophomore year of university. Racist
Education: Dorthella goes to ISU, but she has also been in a boarding school and a typical school back in England. She isn’t sure about her career path yet, but is considering teaching. She is somewhat of a good student, but has other interests. Homeless
Hobbies, interests: Dorthella loves reading and writing stories, as well as “hands and crafts” activities.

***

Name: Dorthella
Age: 15
Gender: Girl
Cultural background: Dorthella lived in England from the time she was born to her twelfth birthday, after which she moved abroad to Mongolia. Culturally, she considers herself British, but she has travelled a lot and would like to believe she has an “international culture.” She is the second eldest in a family of three. Her little sister is turning nine and her older brother is in his sophomore year of university but she dropped out of high school because of a rare condition called "Uglymonia".
Education: Dorthella goes to ISU, but she has also been in a boarding school and a typical school back in Haiti. She isn’t sure about her career path yet, but is considering profesional boxing. She is somewhat of a good student, but has other interests like pole dancing.
Hobbies, interests: Dorthella loves reading and writing stories, as well as “hands and crafts” activities. I also llove shopping <3>


These edits actually did make me laugh at first, but I can see how in a more serious website such as Wikipedia people fooling around like this would be less than helpful. And even though most of the edits were negative, there were also some contributors that took it as their mission to rectify false information. I had people change SMS languages others had added to proper Englsih, others add indentation and such things. However, no one really helped improve the script's content or dialogue - they only changed the grammar.

I found out about all these different types of edits by going through the "Recent Activity" section, which provided a very helpful "Show Changes" function. Using it, you could see precisely which user changed what and when, and also revert back to any previous versions. That's what I did at the end of our unit, as n0ne of the changes were really helpful. I guess in this case the whole wiki side to our script ended up being pretty useless, and the idea of having everyone access the page was not beneficial to its quality.

However, we were also in a special context: we're all teenagers, and we knew we were editing the work of our classmates and friends. The people on Wikipedia are obviously more concerned about the quality of their work than we are. From this experiment, I would say wikis are a useful tool if there is someone behind to moderate the pages and make sure useless changes such as "PrincessGirl20391 was here! LOL!" are removed. But if the pages are simply left "out there" for anyone to edit, without another person behind supervising the information, there are more people who will be tempted to add silly edits than people who will actually improve the wiki. I think the main thing about a wiki is that it must be made of a community of motivated people. Teenagers would actually keep a page on a TV show or a book serious, for example.

Here are some applications for wikis our class thought of:

• Advertising
• Fan group
• Surveys
• Support groups
• Debates
• Writing a book together
• Keep a record of your conversations