After we were told that we had to write upon wikipedia, I became very excited. Writing up a wikipedia article is something I've always wanted to do but have never had the motivation or determination to actually accomplish. It's an entertaining idea to have enough information to add a noticeable amount to something everyone in the world has access to, it's like you become part of something bigger than yourself. I think it's part of human nature to want to rattle off information one knows. You see it in everyday life, someone telling a random fact, something they learned in class, possibly just the weather for the next few days. There's just something about teaching people or reporting information to people that just feels fulfilling.
I think that part of the report to want to reveal information to others is, in a way, to boost one's own ego. Not in the same way that someone would go out and chug down whey protein and pump iron 8 days a week, but in a subconscious way, just making you feel a bit more confident in your credibility or ability to converse and trade facts. This makes me think that there is a link between giving information and Donald Murray's article on every part of writing being autobiographic. He states that even the most formal writing, like a scholarly journal, can be called autobiographic. I truly believe that the same can be said for every wikipedia article online. Even though wikipedia is strictly an informational resource, there are many hints showing people's own personal work.
I certainly felt as though I had a personal investment within the article I was editing. After days of research and years of gaining personal interest and information I could really feel the article coming together before I had even written anything down. "My war stories are constructed of what I experienced, what I heard later, what the history books say, what I needed to believe to survive and recover..." (College Composition and Communication 76) In this quote Murray tells us that what he says about the war is not only from his own experience, but from the information he has gathered around him. I think this is the same way most wikipedia articles are made; someone has to have some sort of initial interest in the subject in which they are creating a wikipedia article about. That is personal investment. I don't think that any one of the students in class picked an article that they very truly dislike or have no liking for at all. The point I would like to make by bringing this up is simply that even something as formal as wikipedia articles can be found as autobiographic. People are merely showing their interest in a subject by adding to the mound of knowledge of it online.
This brings me to another subject brought up in the readings that I had noticed whilst writing my article draft, errors. In The Phenomenology of Error Joseph Williams talks about what you can consider an error, and who has decided what these errors are. He also states that most people who talk about these errors being some horrible thing end up making the very errors they are talking down on. As I wrote my first draft I felt very confined on how I should word things or how I should present a bit of information. It made me think about the guidelines of formal writing and who decided that when we write an article it has to have these set boundaries to make it a legitimate piece of work for your peers to even consider reading.
The fact that I had to make sure I was staying in the boundaries set before me made it very hard to concentrate on the content of the article. As Joseph points out, errors can sometimes distract a reader, not allowing them to read what is being written, but see what has been done wrong. With this in mind I was careful of my spelling, grammar and sentence structure. I made sure I wrote down everything I wanted to put in the article on paper first, then I could read it over and rearrange things I didn't like and go back and see what I changed later. Even after writing the article and looking through it again after having a day to be away from it, I still feel as though I've missed something or made some type of error I can't see. Even with the stress of trying to make every aspect of the article as ship-shape as I could, I really liked the project. I would definitely try it again on another subject, only if I had to for a grade though....
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