For this week’s Wiki Wednesday, we’re taking a look at some of our favorite wikis across the web, celebrating the ways they bring people together to share and collaborate on all kinds of educational, recreational and scientific projects. Some of Our Favorite Wikis Founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sangor, and undoubtedly the most famous wiki, Wikipedia is the “free encyclopedia anyone can edit.” As of today, its English language version boasts 4,617,812 articles. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects never stop – they grow at an estimated rate of 10 edits/sec. Pretty amazing. I continue to be impressed with…
Author: Matthew Vetter
Matthew Vetter
VIsiting Assistant Professor of English at Ohio University Zanesville, Matthew Vetter earned his PhD from Ohio University in 2015, where he previously served as Assistant Director of Composition. His research and professional interests include digital rhetoric and humanities, writing program administration, and composition pedagogy. Vetter is a former Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Graduate Fellow and current editor of PraxisWiki, a section of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. Check out his portfolio at mattvetter.net
Wikis aren’t anything like other traditional forms of textual media. For one, they’re extremely transparent. In a wiki, as opposed to a book, we have access to the rich “archaeology” of a text. We can see who worked to compose it, what revisions it went through, and how it has changed from early drafts to more recent ones. Books, in some ways, are deceptive. They don’t reveal these secrets. They hide the messy process, the “shitty first drafts,” and lead us, and especially our students, into forgetting how writing is always recursive, collaborative, and of course, extremely messy. This lesson plan…
That’s right! We’re bringing Wiki Wednesdays back here at the DRC. This series, which got its start last April, aims to provide a regular space to discuss and celebrate the place of wikis in our field, and, most importantly, to encourage readers to edit our own wiki devoted to digital rhetorics. To accomplish this first goal, we’re planning a number of special feature posts, including lesson plans for using wikis and Wikipedia in the classroom, guest interviews, and discussions. Our second hope for Wiki Wednesdays is that we can motivate YOU to get involved with editing the DRC wiki. We’ve…
What’s in a wiki? Wikis are the epitome of Web 2.0. They’re interactive, generative, collaborative spaces of commons-based peer production that are heterarchical rather than hierarchical. They disperse the means and process of meaning production across multiple contributors. The wiki represents a stark departure from textual/digital plat/forms in which readers are “limited to passive viewing of content” (“Web 2.0”). In a wiki, readers become writers. I’m fascinated by wikis. I first started thinking about wikis as textual tools when a Professor in my graduate program at Ohio University, Albert Rouzie, asked our new media course to create an assignment that engaged…