Derek has started a "CCCarnival" for Karen Kopelson's recent article in College Composition and Communication, and I'm using it as an excuse to stop the process of moving/unpacking. Put in the terms of Kopelson's discussion, I'm taking a break from "practice" to do some "theory." In responding to this piece, I'd like to focus on two things: the discussion of "new converts" to Rhet/Comp and the discussion of how Rhet/Comp "borrows" most (if not all) of its theory.

My dissertation is moving along these days. I've drafted an opening chapter that explains why I see Wikipedia's constitution of hospitality (that is, its willingness to invite a broad range of writers) as a reason to rethink some key terms like intellectual property, community, and rhetorical agency. I've also drafted two other chapters: one that takes up the Essjay controversy and Citizendium and another that focuses on the Seigenthaler controversy and tools like Wikiscanner.

Mackenzie Meador, a writer for The Daily Texan, contacted me yesterday with some questions about Wikipedia. Her story in today's edition rehashes some of the arguments that appear in most news stories about Wikipedia, and she seems to have gotten a good range of viewpoints. Hopefully, my remarks weren't too cliché.

College basketball once banned dunking because of Lew Alcindor (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). What will baseball do with Pat Venditte?

For those not so familiar with baseball: Left-handed hitters generally hit better against right-handed pitchers, and right-handed hitters generally hit better against left-handed pitchers. Being able to throw with both arms gives the pitcher a distinct advantage by allowing him or make their decision about which arm to use after the batter steps into the box. Now, throw a switch-hitter into the mix, and you get the "Ring Around the Rosie" game shown above.

Have you ever come across a piece of writing that basically sums up your dissertation better than you could? I think I just did. Now, it would make more sense if this writing had come from my dissertation director, but what I found was written by someone I've never met and who (to my knowledge) has not clue that my dissertation even exists. And so I say "Thank you, Nat Torkington." While writing about a Wikipedia dust up regarding the "notability" of a hacker named "Why_the_lucky_stiff"(and the possible deletion of his Wikipedia article), Torkington's post at O'Reilly Radar did a fairly decent job of summing up Hospitable Texts. He didn't hit every point. But hey, nobody's perfect:

"Perhaps an analogy to another social process would help. Wikipedia is like an open source software project where the great unwashed submit patches, the committers choose which to apply, and the core team make executive decisions when needed. There's no piece of code that determines worthiness to be committed to the source tree. Instead, there are people with judgement and human flaws in the way. The Linux kernel shouldn't grow e-mail protocol stacks, web server hacks, and a built-in relational database just because someone submits the patches. The project's committers are there to keep the software project on track. So too with Wikipedia.

Hating the humans or even hating the filtering process is a waste of time and energy. The deletionists and the inclusionists both have a role to play. Wikipedia has a lot of things that it is not and the humans are there to keep the project on track. Those who want to delete and want to keep are doing their bit, just as others did by creating a page for _why in the first place.

The creators of any piece of social software must carefully choose where to punch holes in pure computational deterministic perfection to let human attributes like intelligence or taste shine through. Their choices define the project. This 'you want X, I want Y, we'll go back and forth citing Wikipedian principles and external sources until a decision emerges or must be made by an administrator' process isn't Wikipedia's weakness, or even its strength, it is Wikipedia."

Weezer's new Red Album is out, and The Valve has something to say about it. I think I pretty much agree with this assessment. I hate "Heart Songs," but I kinda love "Everybody Get Dangerous" even if it is "forgettably adolescent."

This one is MUCH better than Make Believe even if it doesn't quite hit the level of Pinkerton or The Blue Album...but not much ever will. Plus, I'm 30 years old. If I was 18, I'm betting I'd love everything about the more recent Weezer efforts. People grow out of stuff.

Encyclopaedia Britannica is getting ready to release a new interactive site that will allow "participation by both...expert contributors and readers." The site will "become the hub of a new online community." The plan sounds interesting. It sounds like readers will be able to contribute to the site, even if that contributed content will be separate from the "core content" of Britannica:

Encyclopaedia Britannica will continue to form the core base of knowledge and information on the site, though the material created by contributors and the user community, which each member will control and be credited for, will be published alongside the encyclopedia. Encyclopaedia Britannica itself will continue to be edited according to the most rigorous standards and will bear the imprimatur “Britannica Checked” to distinguish it from material on the site for which Britannica editors are not responsible.

And then there's this:

Stephen Dolan, a student at Trinity College Dublin, has done some research on the "center" of Wikipedia. That is, he's looked at how articles are linked together in a "six degrees of separation" kind of way. It turns out that the "center" of Wikipedia is the page for 2007. As Dolan explains, it takes "3.45 clicks to get to any of the 2111479 articles reachable from [the 2007 article]." This finding might give some support to those who think Wikipedia tends to focus more on recent events.

When Dolan removed all "lists" from his dataset (such as entries for what happened in certain years or on certain days) he found that the center of Wikipedia was the article for United Kingdom.

The results here aren't too surprising, but the more interesting point to me is that Wikipedia allows for this kind of analysis. I was reminded of Derek's RSA presentation about "distant reading" - reading that allows us to examine the archive from afar using certain kinds of metadata. Derek's talk was more about disciplinary texts in rhetoric and composition and how new ways of sorting can rework how we read disciplinary research and what research is findable.

I put together this audio presentation using Audacity software for the Rhetoric Society of America conference. The panel presentation was called "Rhetoric and the Amateur," and each participant tried out a technology that they knew nothing about.

The "Why?" Question is the question I always get when I talk about distance running. If you listen to the presentation (which is, predictably, quite amateurish), you'll get some possible answers to this question.

We have yet another example of how Wikipedia has shaped (and narrowed?) our understanding of what a wiki does. The latest in the "pedia" craze is McCainPedia.

McCainpedia.org is a wiki run by the DNC's Research, Communications, and Internet teams. The goal is to centralize research material, allowing the general public to use it as they see fit. Unlike some wikis, McCainpedia is read-only and can't be edited by the public. This allows us to fully validate all of the information that appears, ensuring accuracy and reliability.

It's not that McCainPedia is bad, it's that it contributes to an ever-growing list of "pedias" that envision a wiki as a knowledge repository or an information dump. Are there other ways to use wikis? Ways beyond the encyclopedia model? It seems like we're not even trying to imagine what wikis can do.

McCainPedia is not an "anyone can edit" wiki; it's written by the "DNC's Research, Communications, and Internet teams." Its information seems to be well-sourced (statements footnoted with links to the Congressional Record).