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Stuart Geiger and I presented a paper about Wikipedia literacy in Linz, Austria for WikiSym 2012 (link below). It’s in the short paper series in which we introduce the concept of of “trace literacy”, a multi-faceted theory of literacy that sheds light on what new knowledges and organizational forms are required to improve participation in Wikipedia’s communities. The paper focuses on three short case studies about the misunderstandings resulting from article deletions in the past year and relate them to three key problems that literacy practitioner and scholar, Richard Darville outlined in his English literacy research. Two of the case studies are from interviews that we did with Kenyan Wikipedians, and the other concerns the Haymarket affair article controversy. Literacy, we believe, has a lot more to do with users being able to understand the complex traces left by experienced editors and how, where and when to argue their case, than simply learning how MediaWiki syntax works. Find the paper at: http://www.wikisym.org/ws2012/bin/download/Main/Program/p21wikisym2012.pdf
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“Writing up rather than writing down”
Becoming Wikipedia literate “Wr
H. Ford & S. GeigerWikiSym 2012
Literacy scholarship
Two main approaches (from Street 1993):•Educators and psychologists take a skills-based approach and focus on elements of reading and writing •Anthropologists & sociolinguists focus on social and cultural aspects of reading and writing and the rich cultural variations of these practicesStreet, B., ed. Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993.
Studying “literacy” and Wikipedia
Two main approaches have dominated:•Reader-focused: responsible use of Wikipedia as a resource, similar to “media literacy” for the news•General purpose: “Web literacy” seeks a common set of core competencies required by digital learners everywhere.
Studying “literacy” and Wikipedia
We instead focus on organizational literacy, the “background knowledges” (Darville 1989) needed to be an empowered, literate member of a community like Wikipedia.
Organizational literacies are often highly local, situated, contextual, and tacit.
Darville, R. The Language of Experience and the Literacy of Power. In M. Taylor and J. Draper, eds., Adult Literacy Perspectives. Culture Concepts, Toronto, 1989.
Trace literacyWikipedians extensively use trace data – revision histories, edit summaries, templates, warnings, tags, logs, archives – to interact and coordinate tasks. Editors come to know each other not only through interpersonal communication, but also highly-complex modes of tracing.
New Wikipedians don’t always know that:•Talk pages, edit summaries, and process pages are used to perform different kinds of specific tasks•Templates like {{hangon}}, {{stub}} and {{helpme}} have special meanings in Wikipedia’s bureaucracies•References serve to establish notability of article topics in addition to verifying individual claims in the article•Edit histories, user talk messages, and usernames are public, and Wikipedians routinely surveil each other
•Not all users are human, but there are ways of determining who is and who is not a bot
Method•Grounded accounts of actual practice in different socio-cultural contexts in order to understand the central role of power relations in literacy practice.
•Focusing on “what went wrong” in order to work out where the system needs to be exposed/made transparent.
•3 case studies of deletions in Kenya and the US.
Misreadings, misunderstandings1.“Misreading organizational texts”2.“Agentless accounts”3.“Writing up rather than writing down”
•Richard Darville
1. Misreading organizational
texts•“Misreading is not about being unable to get words off the page, but rather being unable to participate effectively in the social action and relations that are carried in texts and documents - or even to see what that action and those relations are.” Darville
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/130704/
2. “Agentless accounts”
•“When the agents of actions are deleted from texts, readers must “fill them in,” using a background knowledge of how actions are done and who would do them.” Darville
•Kipsizoo “... we opted to try to create it in Swahili rather. Cause the guys are so harsh (on English WP)... We clearly indicated that these are just stub articles. I think it was a bot or something. It wasn’t a real guy... maybe.”
• (Interview, Nairobi, Kenya, 4 August, 2011)
3. “Writing up rather than writing
down”•“What counts is how matters can
be written up (to enter them into the organizational process), not how they can be written down (to relate experience or aid memory)”. Darville
In conclusion•literacy is a way of exercising power in
Wikipedia;•debates surrounding these deletions are
often about who was right and who was wrong, without an understanding of what was being misunderstood, what was being misread;
•further work on particular types of “background knowledges” for different social, economic, cultural contexts are required to design more transparent systems.
The risk?Claims that Wikipedians are merely
opposed to the perspectives of those dissimilar from them
(whether that is that they are from Africa or the academy) is not
helping the encyclopedia grow in areas that it is currently weak.
