It's crazy to think that the semester is nearly over and of all the work and analysis we have been able to accomplish during these few short weeks. This pending Wikipedia project seemed daunting in the beginning of the semester. I had never worked or composed in such a public sphere, let alone so collaboratively. Wikipedia was a sorely misjudged and under-appreciated medium for me when I began this class. But after working so closely with it, and in this assignment in particular, I feel much more prepared to write and publish in the Wiki soon. So pardon some of the nostalgia, but in completing this last short assignment, I didn't realize how much more confident I had grown as both a critical reader and editor. It was one of my greatest struggles in Short Assignment #3. In reading the text, I could point out where the error but was not sure on how to properly fix it. Whether it was an issue of punctuation, tense or tone, it was much more difficult for me last time to really hone in on what problems could be addressed and fixed in my editing. But this time around, for both the small and large editing task, I felt much more qualified to be making such editorial judgments.
The goal in editing is to strive for clarity and transparency, which I found to be much easier in this assignment. Especially in dealing with Wikipedia, the neutrality required of its articles must also be expected from its editors. Editing an already neutral text made any bias decisions much more easy to avoid. It wasn't that these texts could be interpreted or presented in any kind of skewed point of view- Wikipedia wouldn't allow for that kind of text to be hosted on its site. This also made any kind of debatable clause much easier to identify and fix. They were harder to find in such an opinionated text as the last one we were to edit; they could hide between the lines. In a skewed text, a reader can be distracted by the meaning of the text and as a result miss an error that needs editing. But in such a surface text as these Wikipedia articles I was analyzing, it is much more obvious when opinions are being used in the wrong context. I tried to keep this idea in mind while editing both parts of the project. This neutral outlook on these Wikipedia articles also made it clear that the only level of stases at work are of fact and definition. As Fahenstock and Secor outline this strategy for building an argument, it becomes clear that this type of text is not intended to argue anything. It is merely a foundation for reporting and relaying information to the general and "universal" audience. The text stays between these two levels because anything higher in the order can be debated or is of the author's personal interpretation. Wikipedia is not the venue for such an argument to be made. Any part of the articles that began to hint at cause, value or policy was then much easier to identify and edit out in order to maintain the neutrality essential to this Wiki format.
One of the most beneficial edits I made in both assignments came from learning about old-new links from our Style chapter on Cohesion and Coherence. It's something that can truly benefit any text to improve the flow of the article in paragraph and in between them. Especially with the last part of this assignment, most of my editorial choices were to improve the cohesion of the article. While it made sense, the text seemed disjointed and did not read together well. To fix this, I tried to rearrange and make connections between the sentences so that they would retain their meaning and intent but would read more fluidly. It was a matter of linking sentence to sentence as well as from paragraph to paragraph. The article on the Brass Quintet had all of its facts but essentially had just compressed a list into a paragraph. Each phrase was a complete thought, but they were not working together to make any kind of cohesive sentence. I had a similar issue in the translated piece on Jordan. It had lost of lot of cohesion between its original written language and its English translation. There was a great opportunity to make meaning from the first article I worked with. It was rewarding at the end of the edits to see how just a few of these links could benefit the cohesion of the article so greatly.
I've learned a lot about myself as a critical reader and analyst through these exercises and short assignments. It is all beginning to make sense why we have done them all, and how they all fit into the larger scope of the class; they are the means of preparation. It will be most satisfying to see the work done in these smaller works transferred into our final Wikipedia article. We know what is expected of it and the guidelines we must follow in order for it to remain published. The more we know about the "do's and don'ts" of this medium, it will only benefit our article in the long run.
