As we venture into our next assignment of creating and submitting our very own Wikipedia article, I found the two articles, “Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship” and “Introduction from Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness” to be extremely insightful and helpful.
“Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship” by M. Thomas Inge, delves into the ideas of authorship, where it is placed, and how it is influenced. I found myself being awestruck at a statement that Inge makes, within the first few lines of the article. Inge makes the claim that all things that are written by an author“…are the result of any number of discourses that take place among the writer, the political and social environments in which the writing occurs, the aesthetic and economic pressures that encourage the process, the psychological and emotional state of the writer, and the reader who is expected to receive or consume the end product when it reaches print”. I found this to be very interesting because it labels how the writings of an author are unique to the time and space they exist in. Some may see this statement as degrading to authors or maybe that it takes credit away from their abilities but, I believe that it does the opposite. It’s simply stating that everything affects and influences writing.
Written by Nathaniel Tkacz, the introduction from Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness, serves as a breakdown of what the rest of the book will entail but, it also delivers a beautiful image of the workings of Wikipedia as well as an explanation of the idea of “Openness”. Tkacz begins to explain Wikipedia by noting how different it was, from a lot of other startup projects that were hosted on the internet, when it first came about. Wikipedia was entirely comprised of contributions from its users, it was nonprofit and whatever it produced was free to the public, its contents were able to be edited without permission, and it was a singular thing that was being made by an uncountable amount of people across the world. To further the definition on what Wikipedia is, Tkacz then begins to talk about its predecessors: Encyclopedias. He mentions that encyclopedias “…regularly offered great insight into the periods in which they were written”. This made think about something very interesting: since Wikipedia is a platform that allows constant revisions, will it be able to function in the same way that the encyclopedias did as historical artifacts? In any case, I think it just goes to show how Wikipedia serves only to give the most up to date factual information it can, at the present moment. As the collective knowledge of humans evolves, so will the pages of Wikipedia.
Joshua Chung 