wickedqueen.net

Recently my friend Travis created a wiki to keep track of his City of Heroes (and City of Villains) characters. Naturally I gave him shit for failing to create the wiki as a joint effort.* Who STARTED him playing City of Heroes, anyway? It was my class assignment;** he jumped on my bandwagon. And who made the original GoogleDoc spreadsheets that let us keep track of what level characters we had on which servers, hm?

When I created those spreadsheets, I originally made them for my characters only, of course. I was going to grant read-only access to my CoX buddies so that they could see at a glance what I had available for teams of various levels, but then it turned out that read-only access on GoogleDocs doesn’t let you sort, which seemed fairly important for the purpose of quickly finding a level ~10 scrapper for a team, so I made them collaborative–which had the added advantage of allowing all of us to list our available characters in one place, even if I frequently forget to update when I level up.

It’s pretty easy to keep a spreadsheet sensible, even with multiple authors. There were fields for character name, server, level, class, and powersets. It was a simple structure and it didn’t need any tweaking. Wikis, on the other hand, grow quickly and in many cases incomprehensibly without a pretty strict template. Editing wikipedia, I’ve encountered this even with minor edits of my own on entries concerning my favorite traditional folk song, Child ballad #10 (the sister-killing song). People don’t like bits of structure on the page–headings about alternative variants. Some people apparently do not like calling anything a “variant” of such a folk song, and other people think that the structure of the page should match other pages. There was some argument on the talk page, the last time I looked, about what exactly a “variant” is and why the last editor (me) was wrong to use the term.

I found this annoying. For one thing, I hate being gainsaid; for another, I hate the sneaking suspicion that I am not adequately equipped to participate in a particular discourse. In the course I took this past semester on collaborative learning, we read a piece by Cress & Kimmerle (2007) that explicitly considered how people use wikis and what motivates them to participate, postulating that the major motivation is that people find a discrepancy between their own knowledge structure and that of the wiki, and are motivated to bring the two into synch by contributing to the wiki. It wasn’t really discussed, however, what people do when they know that they know something that isn’t included in the current wiki knowledge structure, but don’t really know how to go about conveying it.

Wikis, despite many of my colleagues’ impression of them as unlawful, Wild West-ish virtual spaces where anything goes, are very norm-bound. If you don’t edit them right your edits are likely to be absorbed past all recognition. There has to be another push for a person to feel motivated to learn the norms in order to edit at all, which I suspect might come from the critical mass of a LOT of knowledge discrepancies, all of which could be righted by the reader if they were confident that they had a grip on the norms for doing so. Having only felt particularly motivated myself to add known recordings of Child #10 to the relevant pages, I’m not really there yet for wikipedia (and of course, there are some kinds of knowledge that you can probably add without understanding the norms, as when expanding a list).

With a new wiki, though, there’s a different set of problems, which is that everyone enters them with some idea of what a wiki, or this particular wiki, should look like, and in my experience there isn’t much explicit discussion of those norms. I’ve done wikis for several courses now, as well as participated in a few recreational small wikis such as Travis’s CoX site, and the most frequent issue that seems to arise is one of, at least from my viewpoint, people just dumping things every which way like they’re making notes for a prelim or something similarly not meant for the eyes or comprehension of others.

This is how it looks from MY perspective. No doubt from the perspectives of others I am equally irrational and opaque in my organizational preferences, but I’m not psychic. I just know how it looks from in here. It’s possible that we tend to assume too much common understanding once we determine that everyone knows, basically, what a “wiki” is. None of the courses I’ve been in spent any time developing any kind of template, which might have ultimately saved us a lot of frustration.

Another issue, which might stem from (perceived) distribution of labor, is related to collaboration or the lack thereof. Other class wiki participants have noted that some people are not as interested in collaboration as others, and don’t seem to get the basic idea that a wiki is a collaborative work in which particular individual contributions generally disappear. More subtly, it seems like some people don’t think about the need for iterative collaborative work in the context of a wiki–it’s not enough to just dump some information; you actually need to integrate it into what’s there, or check back periodically to see how it’s being integrated by others. Collaborative authorship only works if people really keep working together, keep contributing, keep adding and editing and revising to create a truly collaborative product.

It seems likely that certain teams are going to be better at this than others. Some people were probably not meant to be co-authors. Some people are probably better at collaboration in general, but there is also a quality of partnership in collaborative work like wikis or, more traditionally, co-authored papers. You’re never going to get a perfect team out of a randomly assigned class of people, but it might help to make course wikis truly semester-long endeavors to encourage the development of collaborative practices in groups that might not necessarily have a knack for them at the start. Starting later and asking people to synthesize previously collected material doesn’t really seem to encourage the kind of collaborative creation that course wikis are intended to promote.

Despite my own natural resistance to surrendering authorial control, it can be very satisfying to see a wiki page develop into something bigger than I could or would have created on my own. It’s like those “magic rocks” that grow into colorful stalagmites. Except with knowledge.

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*Don’t worry, he let me in, if for no other reason than to stop my whining.

**One person remarked at the time that assigning an MMOG to students in a course on virtual worlds was kind of like assigning pharmacology students a heroin addiction.

As a graduate student, I am exposed to a lot of people hating on Wikipedia. It’s not like I don’t understand some of the pitfalls. Someone is always going to be quick to point out that
Swaziland (7 pages) is less thoroughly covered on Wikipedia than Gondor (9 pages)–although the latter is still beaten out by Bhutan (11 pages).

Although let’s be serious: the people who are editing the entry on Gondor almost certainly do NOT represent a drain on available resources for Swaziland. You really have to CARE about a subject to edit a wikipedia entry; noting a discrepancy between the information presented and your own personal knowledge (Cress & Kimmerle 2007: 159) is not sufficient, although I’m sure it’s a factor. Probably caring about a topic is correlated with noticing discrepancies; you know stuff about things you care about, and you’re motivated to ensure that other people know the Right stuff about them, too. This is why so far the only wikipedia entries I have ever edited are for Child ballads.

So anyway, you get bias, the way you get with any volunteer sample, but it’s unclear to me how different this is from the bias inherent in any information that someone cares about enough to teach you. Making everyone teach the thing they care about the least doesn’t seem like a workable solution to this problem. I think there’s also a barrier to entry into Wikipedia itself, though, separate from one’s personal knowledge and its fit or lack thereof with what the site presents. Cress & Kimmerle note that “sometimes people only add new information to an existing [Wikipedia] article, and sometimes people completely restructure an article” (2007: 158). I suspect that the people restructuring articles are experienced users who have developed a sense of themselves as Wikipedia-competent, separate from whatever expertise they may possess on a particular subject; new users may recognize their own lack of this kind of competence, and I think it presents a not-insignificant barrier to participation.

Overall, however, I still feel that Wikipedia is a useful resource. I refer to it frequently. Just recently Marc mentioned that it was to Wikipedia that he turned in his search for instructions for the preparation of spaghetti squash. This seems to represent one function of wikis, particularly smaller, less public ones: to build a database of relevant information to participants and make it easy to edit and access. One can easily imagine a recipe/cooking wiki devoted entirely to cooking instructions, and wikis seem to be a popular tool for teams involved in the development of particular products. It’s hard to pin down in these cases how a wiki differs from a very large, interactive FAQ.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, is often explicitly modeled after traditional encyclopedias, and many academics perceive it as some kind of informational Wild West, where anyone can say god knows what and nobody can be trusted to understand SCIENCE. It’s not peer-reviewed, after all.

In fact, as far as I know, neither are traditional encyclopedias. Most academics I know are all in a froth about the possibility of undergraduate students citing wikipedia in papers, but the real issue is that you don’t cite encyclopedias in scholarly research. Encyclopedias are by nature summaries, and you don’t cite summaries in scholarly research–you might, I suppose, cite a review article to support a claim about a particular broad trend in a particular field, but in most cases, you don’t want to be throwing around a bunch of review article citations, either. As I tell my students, you have to find the original source, because people do not trust your interpretation of Academic Telephone, especially if you are a freshman. That means no review articles and no encyclopedia entries, electronic or otherwise.

Maybe if more academics understood what a pain in the ass it is to actually contribute to something as huge and bureaucratic as Wikipedia, they’d have more respect for it, or at least stop acting like it’s run by third-graders with a strong commitment to homeopathy. Most likely we’ll just have to wait for a cohort of people to get old and retire–it is the most reliable mechanism for attitude change.

This past week for my collaborative learning course, we read three articles on activity theory, a theoretical perspective concerned with how actors work towards goals/objects from particular motives/passions, using certain tools to do so–based on the little triangular diagram that seems much beloved of activity theory, I would include “rules” within “tools,” which is of course very ethnomethodological of me.

That is to say, ethnomethodologists often argue that rules are never sufficient to account for people’s actions, no matter how frequently people claim that they did things “because of” rules. Rules are simply resources, another possible tool in the toolkit when people are accounting for action–and in fact, one often sees cases in which people justify a seeming violation of a rule by demonstrating how it was in fact following the “spirit” of the rule or something similar. I like to think of roles in a similar way, actually, although I would freely admit that some roles are harder to get out of or into than others, and of course accounts can fail in the sense that other participants do not accept them. But anyway. Activity theory.

One of the articles, Wolff-Michael Roth’s* “Activity Theory and Education: An Introduction” (2004), discusses the early absence of activity theory from the discipline of education (the course I’m taking is in educational psychology, if you’ll recall). He attributes its rise in visibility in part to articles published in English by Engestrom and notes that you can trace this ascent by looking at the increasing attendance at activity theory-related sessions as the American Educational Research Association national meetings.

As pretty much all academics know, there are trends within academia. Certain topics or theoretical perspectives get hot and everyone wants to get in on the action. Sometimes these trends are Madonna; sometimes they are Britney Spears. In the case of activity theory, the main barrier to its having been promoted earlier seems to have been a lack of English publications; this is certainly a problem for non-English-speaking researchers in engaging in dialogue with a larger audience, but one that I think is often not considered much. I’m guilty myself of crossing off potential references without a second thought if they’re not in English–I’m a graduate student; I have papers to write and articles to submit and classes to teach; I just don’t have time to learn German. This is, however, a good example of how what we know, or think is important, is often shaped by forces that are mostly invisible to us. Even if we know they’re there, we mostly don’t think about them.

Language barriers are an obvious example, but in fact academics’ perspectives are typically a lot narrower than that. We get trained in certain disciplines, with bodies of literature behind them–some of them are older and more entrenched than others, but graduate education is pretty focused anyway. Interdisciplinary research seems to be getting more and more buzz, and it seems obvious that it’s a good approach when you have a particular topic established. I remember a couple of years ago talking to a guy at a party who was interested in autism diagnoses. He wasn’t a sociologist, and had no idea about the work within conversation analysis (narrower and narrower) that had been done on the topic. He was really interested in it when I told him about it. I suspect he probably never read it, or maybe read it and got frustrated and decided to stick with more sensible perspectives.

By which I mean, more sensible to him. Academic training is all about learning a paradigm and working in it. Interdisciplinary research and perspectives seem like a great idea, kind of like ending world hunger, but then they turn out to be really complicated and confusing and people keep referencing pet theorists and very few people actually want to quit being a sociologist or a psychologist or whatever, and there’s a tendency, I think, to get frustrated with people for not having had the same training as you. It’s probably worse when you’re all sort of in the same division, like social science–physicists are clearly alien; you don’t expect them to know anything about Marx. But when people know about Marx, and then turn out not to know what YOU know about Marx, it’s confusing–especially when you start out thinking you know the same things, because duh, why wouldn’t you?**

For example, one of the other articles, a piece on online community, includes a bit on sociability:

The important design point here is that designers shift their focus from simply supporting usability to supporting what Preece (2000) described as ’sociability.’ Barab, MaKinster, Moore, Cunningham, and The ILF Design Team (2001) described sociability as ‘those social policies and technical structures that support the community’s shared purpose and social interactions among group members’ (p. 83)” (Barab et al. 2004)

I realize that what is being termed “sociability” here actually diverges rather sharply from Simmel’s definition of sociability as non-instrumental, but it comes as quite a shock, to a sociologist, to see the word “sociability” and not even a breath of him. This may just be an exaggeration of a problem common to a lot of social scientific terms, which is that we tend to use words like “self” and “motive” that already have vernacular connotations that may not actually mean what we want them to mean.***

I don’t mean, actually, to be negative about interdisciplinary research–I think it’s a good idea, just like a bunch of other people do. I do think that when attempting it, participants needs to really think about their own differences in perspective, and try not to ever assume that two people using the same word mean the same thing. There are language barriers amongst English speakers.

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*It is not often that I encounter another academic with an apparently English name as non-normative as mine.

***I was told once that Japanese academics, as part of their academic training, have to learn new sets of kanji (Chinese characters) for the technical terminology of their discipline. I wonder if their social sciences follow this convention as well, or if they, too, use words pinched from laypeople.

This semester I will be blogging weekly for my course on collaborative learning, because it is a requirement; I will be doing it here rather than on the course site because a) I have enough blogs to maintain already and b) there’s a precedent, if you’ll recall my many prelim-studying entries and those times I geeked out over the stuff we saw in Alice’s digital media literacy class; besides c) my audience is hella nerdy anyway.

I was surprised to find that the first week’s readings actually referenced conversation analysis (CA) quite a bit. Back when I was studying for my prelim on the subject, I read several chapters from an anthology on CA and cognition, so it’s not that I don’t think it’s appropriate for the subject under study, but it’s always interesting to see what people who were not actually trained in CA make of it. Usually something that would make the hardcore CA people cry, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, given the focus of the course and thus the readings on CMC (computer-mediated communication) in the service of collaborative learning, and particularly text-based quasi-synchronous CMC (e.g. chat), the data seem well-fitted to CA. If your concern as an analyst is that you have access to all resources that were available to participants at the time of interaction, chat logs are pretty comprehensive, especially if they’re time-stamped.

In some cases, though, lack of unique adequacy raised issues for me; “‘[u]nique adequacy’ is defined here as the researcher’s ability to analyse the encountered social world from practitioner research rather than from ‘classical social theorising’ (Cuff et al., 1992) perspectives” (Wakefield 2000). Stahl (2006) seems to suggest more difficulty with tracking parallel topics in chat than I believe most participants actually have, especially if they’ve been using chat for their own personal purposes for any length of time. The book was published in 2006, but I’m not entirely sure when the research he references using CMC for group work on math problems was conducted–certainly a major issue in research on the internet in any context is that today’s internet is a dramatically different place from the internet of even five years ago, and the average participant gets more and more savvy with the passing of time.

On the other hand, technologies and applications also change very quickly. As I’ve mentioned before, pretty much the only people MUDding now are the same people who were MUDding in 1992 when it was an exciting topic for academic research. MMOGs are certainly the virtual descendants of MUDs, but they’re not quite the same and they are occupied by mostly different people. Email lists, while not dead, definitely seem to me to be on the way out, although perhaps not in academia as in the general population–my main exposure to email lists outside of academia was in activism and fandom. I wanted to talk about sexuality and read Star Trek pornography, and for some time, those needs were mainly met by Usenet and listservs.

Now, however, there are websites, particularly hive communities like LiveJournal, and communities on Facebook. Almost all the undergraduates who I interviewed last semester about Facebook use remarked at some point or another that email was “formal” and not something they used for socialization or personal communication. This is probably not going to stop academics, because we are the kind of people who like spreadsheets and monographs and Being Important, but for everyone else, email seems to have become sort of stuffy and boring, like actual mail or something.

Even chat, which is to me so familiar that I tend not to distinguish in vernacular reports whether I was talking to someone face-to-face or virtually, may be on its way to obsolescence even as I type. Text messaging on mobile devices seems a bit different in character than chat, and now that everyone has a cell phone and everyone is also online, I think there are fewer extended interactions happening in chat, even if people do leave their AIM up as a kind of answering service, competing to have the deepest or wittiest away message in the dorm. Or, you know, I’ve always been weird; maybe it was always more random solicitations for cybersex than anything else. It’s not like my college chats were deep, but they were properly punctuated.

Really, I just wonder how long it will be before computer voice chat largely supplants text chat. Gamers already prefer it; they use third party applications to supplement the game interfaces that supply only text chat because it’s so clunky, especially when you’re trying to coordinate raids. I use Skype when I play City of Heroes, and I’ve also started using it to call my parents because my cell phone service is so shitty in my new place. As everyone’s systems catch up, I can easily see more and more people using voice chat in place of the phone, but also in place of “impersonal” text. Voice may kill the chat star. Maybe. On the other hand, there are advantages to not being totally present for the people to whom you’re talking, and sometimes I don’t want to devote that much attention.

Once again, I have to say simply that all I know about the internet in five years is that I probably can’t imagine it. Sure, I want that headjack as much as ever, but even if I get it, there’s no telling what comes with it. It makes it hard to keep your research current.