Thursday, September 29, 2011

Authoring for Wikipedia: a retrospective


Indeed, I did make use of the five steps of writing. Even if I was not consciously working under them, my process can clearly be broken down, examined, and explained by them.
Planning is the first step of any writing, whether done consciously or otherwise. I can’t honestly say I planned a whole lot out before writing. With the Slim Phatty synthesizer, I knew that I wanted to utilize such things as an info box detailing the specs and properties of the device. I also wanted to spend some time comparing and contrasting it with the synth it is based off of: the Little Phatty. With this in mind, I just kind of took of with it I guess; plugging in information wherever I deemed appropriate.
A conventional draft also did not exist. Instead, I had a roughly hashed out version of my page. From there, I simply kept running through and bulking sections out with each pass. Revising also makes an appearance here, as this essentially occurred as I was improving upon each earlier incarnation.
Alignment is something that also did not really exist. Alignment only occurred in the sense of trying to avoid it. By remaining conscious of maintaining a neutral and unbiased tone, I was consciously trying to avoid aligning myself either for or against the subject of my article.
In the context of the authoring a Wikipedia article, I would say that monitoring would be defined as the constant self-critiquing and editing that occurred throughout the assignment. Not only fine-tuning at the micro level, but changing the whole organization of the page, the flow and direction of each paragraph, and even where to put pictures and topic headlines.

1 comment:

  1. I would argue that even though you say you didn't have a conventional draft or drafting process, you probably did. Writing is weird because the first words you put on a page aren't likely to be the same in the final draft, so it almost feels useless to start b/c you know it's going to change. However, the first draft is really a good mental exercise to exercise the little thought demons out of your brain and on to the page, so you can ax, bolster, or manipulate them. It took me forever to come up with the first sentence of my article because I wanted it to be just right - I had fragments of each try left over after butchering out the stuff I knew wouldn't fit, eventually I frankenstein'd them together.

    ReplyDelete