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Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning
a digital book-in-progress
Book in-progress
Read Web Writing final manuscript
How to read & comment;
How our website works
General comments on the book
Follow our Blog/RSS/Twitter/Email
Sister Classrooms: Blogging Across Disciplines and Campuses
Indigenizing Wikipedia: Student Accountability to Native American Authors on the World's Largest Encyclopedia
Science Writing, Wikis, and Collaborative Learning
Web Writing in the University Community: Problem Solving through Collaboration and Convergence
Collaborative Writing, Peer Review, and Publishing in the Cloud
Cooperative In-Class Writing with Google Docs
Consider the Audience
Engaging Students with Scholarly Web Texts
Tweet Me A Story
Creating an Environment for Student Engagement and Web Writing: The "We Just Want Stephen Colbert to Come to Our College" Super PAC
Public Writing and Student Privacy
Crossing Boundaries
Getting Uncomfortable: Identity Exploration in a Multi-Class Blog
Identity Exploration Assignment
Curation in Writing: Using a "Building" and "Breaking" Pedagogy to Teach Culture in the Digital Age
Student Digital Research and Writing on Slavery: Problems and Possibilities
Web Writing as Intercultural Dialogue
Citation and Annotation
Web Writing and Citation: The Authority of Communities
Empowering Education with Social Annotation and Wikis
The Secondary Source Sitting Next To You
There Are No New Directions in Annotations
How We Learned to Drop the Quiz: Writing in Online Asynchronous Courses
Code-Switching to Improve Composition in the Liberal Arts
Visuality and Vital Information: Bridging the Gap between the Seen and the Understood
Learning to Write at a Distance
How this book evolved
Editorial process and Intellectual Property policy (April 2013 – present)
Open Call for Essay Ideas and Proposals (April – June 2013)
Essay submission instructions (June-Aug 2013)
WordPress guide for contributors (Aug-Sept 2013)
Book contract with Michigan Publishing (Aug 2013)
About the Open Peer Review (Sept-Oct 2013)
Sample essay starters with MediaCommons
Choosing the "Write" Tools to Match the Learning Goals
How to manage "crowd-writing" on a shared Google document
How to organize simultaneous peer review with Google Docs
How to share, comment, or co-author a Google Doc
What Makes a Good Web Essay?
If You Build It, Will They Come . . . and Comment?
Comments by Commenter
Siobhan Senier
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 6 In Spring 2013 I had my students write for Wikipedia. This is by no means an original idea, but the specific assignment was somewhat novel: in a senior class on 21st Century Native American Literature, each student was to write a biography of a living Native American author (one not yet represented on the site), crafting an entry that met both the author's and Wikipedia's standards. 1 It's been a long time since I have had students so eager to get things right, and so proud of the results. Though we definitely flushed out some problems–namely Wikipedia's "notability" requirements, discussed below–the assignment was a success. Students gained new skills, and a better grasp of the professional writing process. The Native authors were gratified to be represented on Wikipedia, and often eager to help with sources. And I got to enjoy the pedagogical role of facilitator, rather than gatekeeper, while helping to improve Wikipedia's representation of indigenous literature.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Contrary to popular belief, it is not the case that "anybody" can put "anything" on Wikipedia. The site has rigorous, surprisingly complex standards–although, in the interest of recruiting new writers, it boils these down to 5 "pillars":
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 4
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia (containing no primary research or opinions);
It is written from a "neutral point of view" (NPOV);
It is free content that anyone can edit, use, modify and distribute;
Editors (contributors) should treat each other with respect and civility;
Wikipedia does not have firm rules (its guidelines are subject to contributor debate). 2
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 6 Every hour, thousands of volunteer Wikipedians (with varying levels of editorial power) vet the site, accepting or rejecting articles, cleaning them up to meet basic editorial standards, and flagging them (e.g., "This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it" or "The neutrality of this article is disputed"). 3 There are robots to root out common errors and predictable vandalism (e.g., high school students inserting profanities); and a "three-revert" rule to shut down edit wars (with some sites, like Justin Bieber's, on lockdown). 4 As any thoughtful person who has used the site knows, Wikipedia is not unproblematic. It does contain errors, and some frankly appalling prose. It has bizarre imbalances in coverage (e.g., that incomprehensibly long entry on Bieber, compared with one just a fraction of that length on Cherokee chief Wilma Mankiller). It is not, however, the unscrupulous free-for-all that some people imagine. 5
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 3 Wikipedia encourages School and University Projects, offering online tutorials and other support for teachers and students; hundreds of courses, all over the world, have signed up. 6 Several such experiments have been described in the volume Writing History in the Digital Age. Amanda Seligman uses Wikipedia in a historical methods course at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to teach undergraduates about tertiary sources; Shawn Graham had freshmen in a Digital History seminar at Carleton University "blitz"-edit a single entry, on the Ottawa Valley. 7 In these case studies, historians use Wikipedia to reflect on their profession's standards, comparing these to the practices of popular and crowdsourced history, particularly when it comes to the notion of neutrality.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 2 But, in that volume, only Martha Saxton, who teaches Women's History at Amherst College, tackles the more global problem: "to the extent that popular judgment determines what history gets produced in this format, the significance of women's role in it and gender as a discourse or a method of analysis are likely to be devalued." 8 I, too, was concerned about Wikipedia's failures in coverage—specifically, its lack of representation of Native American authors, and even more specifically, its lack of representation of Native American authors based in New England, though that last failure is not unique to Wikipedia. 9 Before Spring 2013, the site included only three Native authors from this region: eighteenth-century Mohegan minister Samson Occom, nineteenth-century Pequot minister William Apess, and contemporary Abenaki poet Joseph Bruchac). 10 This trifecta, repeated in many anthologies and a good deal of literary scholarship, perpetuates the misconception that Native people in New England assimilated early on, and exist only as isolated individuals today.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 3 Coincidentally, in that same spring, a new movement to revise Wikipedia was gathering steam. Moya Z. Bailey, a scholar and blogger well known in Digital Humanities circles, used the Twitter hashtag #toofew (for "Feminists Engage Wikipedia") to recruit new writers and editors. 11 She set March 15, 2013, as a day for scholars and students to gather (face to face as well as virtually) to edit the site in conjunction with some of the edit-a-thons run by THATCamp. 12 The event had a Wikipedia meetup page, where people could sign in and propose content; and it was announced broadly on The Chronicle of Higher Education, HASTAC, and even Al Jazeera, where Bailey called for Wikipedia to "better reflect the diversity of our living." 13 Since March 15, the editing initiatives have continued, including Adeline Koh and Roopika Risam's "Rewriting Wikipedia Project." 14 These scholars are responding to increasingly visible reports (including the Wikimedia Foundation's own editor surveys) indicating that only about 10 percent of contributors are women. 15 They are also scrutinizing Wikipedia's purportedly "objective" criteria. As Koh and Risam argue, these criteria depend on "the weight of already-existing knowledge, knowledge which postcolonial studies writers have systematically argued is racially and culturally charged. To subscribe to [these concepts] uncritically has the effect of reproducing uneven social forms of privilege against groups that deserve to be represented." As my students found, when it comes to Native American authors, Wikipedia's "notability" benchmark is particularly troublesome. 16
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 "Native American Literature in the 21st Century" enrolled mainly senior and junior English majors (a couple from Journalism, one from History). I had planned from the beginning to have students write for a site I manage, called Writing of Indigenous New England. But after #toofew inspired me to try my hand at adding a very brief entry (on Abenaki poet Cheryl Savageau), I began to see the pedagogical possibilities of asking students to post their author profiles on Wikipedia first. 17
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 3 Professorial maligning of Wikipedia aside, I do not know too many who truly require their students to abide by standards as rigorous as those of Wikipedia, whatever we might wish or claim. This was an enormous surprise for me as well as my students, and I have colleagues who still refuse to believe it. But the students found there was simply no way to grade-grub or plea-bargain their way out of the site's very basic writing standards. If they committed mechanical errors, an anonymous editor would correct those. If they committed too many, an editor could take their article down altogether, or at least flag it ("This article could benefit from an improvement in writing style"). If their research was thin, they'd be mortified to find some 17-year-old in Turkey declaring their article a "stub," or someone with a silly handle nominating their work for deletion altogether. In the end, one of this assignment's greatest boons was that students came to see me the way I'd always seen myself—as the facilitator, not the bad guy. They were in closer and more frequent contact with me about their drafts than any students I can remember, seeming unusually accountable and motivated.
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 4 Part of this was undoubtedly due to Wikipedia's publicity and immediacy. It can take me days to reply to students' blog posts, a week to return their essays; but a Wikipedia editor might respond in as little as 20 minutes. More profoundly, students responded to the intensely collaborative nature of the enterprise as a whole. One said, "I often feel that I am just taking, taking, taking from the Internet and rarely being a contributor. Now I can put something up online that is credible, academic, and a contribution to the World Wide Web." 18
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 8 I gave students a clear sequence of steps, spread out over 3-4 weeks: 1. Sign up for a Wikipedia account, and take the tutorials. 19 2. Begin drafting your article in your sandbox, and send me the link. 20 3. After I approve your draft, send the link to the Native author who is your subject for feedback. (Each author was someone with whom I was personally acquainted, and had contacted in advance, asking if they'd be willing to participate in this project, and I brokered the introductions of students to their assigned authors.) 4. "Create" the article. 21 I was fortunate to teach in a digital lab, so we devoted several class periods to reviewing what makes an article "stick" in Wikipedia, as well as to writing and editing. Many students, at least at my public university, still lack basic web literacy—signing up for accounts, following tutorials—and most were grievously intimidated by the prospect of using markup (which Wikipedia has since made optional). The assignment was thus an empowering one for our English majors, showing them that they can master more "tech" skills than they realized. Moreover, writing for Wikipedia is a powerful lesson in professional writing process. Some graduating seniors, who had grown rather accustomed to writing their essays the night before their deadlines, and squeaking through with Bs or Cs, found that this was simply impossible in this platform. Thus, some found their articles proposed for deletion, and did poorly on the assignment, because they skipped some of the interim, low-stakes (yet critically important) parts of the assignment designed to keep them researching, writing and revising.
¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 2 Proposed deletion is not the only interesting thing that happened during this class experiment; but it was, for students, the scariest thing, and it is probably the thing that reveals the most about the politics of "indigenizing" Wikipedia. Some of my students who wrote what were, in my estimation, very good articles nevertheless had their work proposed for deletion, on the grounds that their subjects did not meet Wikipedia's "notability" criterion. To be considered "notable" enough to pass muster with Wikipedia, a subject has to have received "significant coverage" in "reliable, published [secondary] sources." Like many college professors, Wikipedians favor newspaper and magazine articles, along with scholarly books and journals. But telling students that something published by Harvard University Press is "better" than anything published on a tribal website isn't really teaching them critical thinking, in any event. As my students delved further into their topics, and began actually consulting with Native writers and historians, they found what historian Roy Rosenzweig pointed out years ago, so beautifully and succinctly: "the general panic about students' use of Internet sources is overblown. You can find bad history in the library." 22
¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 1 Two journalism majors, who I would say had been only modestly engaged with course content up to that point, were suddenly on fire at 2 a.m., when their article on Narragansett journalist John Christian Hopkins was proposed for deletion: 23
¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Click to view full version of excerpt from "Talk" page on John Christian Hopkins entry in Wikipedia, 2013.
¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 Aside from the mortification of being called out by someone called "duffbeerforme," these students were invested, and wanted that article to stick. And they had ample opportunity to improve their piece: as indicated in Wikipedia's five pillars, the site's rules are seldom carved in stone, and editors try to operate by consensus, rather than outright votes. In the debate that ensued, "Vizjim" pointed to institutional biases against Native intellectual sovereignty, a concept that eluded "duffbeerforme": 24
¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 3 Participating in such forums, students engaged in real conversations about real matters affecting Native people, while getting practical experience in convincing readers that their topic matters–not least by improving their research and writing. The Hopkins debate was finally closed for lack of consensus, and (at least as of this writing) the article remains live.
¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 2 Very few things on Wikipedia are permanent, so I told the students it wasn't the end of the world if their articles were flagged or proposed for deletion. I granted favorable grades to those who conducted their research scrupulously and polished their drafts assiduously, no matter the outcome among Wikipedians. Perhaps the most vexing "notability" debate came over the article on Trace DeMeyer, an award-winning journalist from The Pequot Times and Indian Country Today who has published a memoir, an anthology about Indian out-adoptees, and a book of poetry, among other works. 25 But here's the rub: her books are mainly self-published, and she has received little coverage by sources not already affiliated with her. At the end of the semester, and well after the student writer had graduated, this article—as well researched as any of those our class produced—had still been declined. Some weeks later the discussion was revived and, as with the John Christian Hopkins article, the DeMeyer piece was allowed to stand for lack of editorial consensus:
¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Click to view full version of excerpt from "Talk" page on Trace DeMeyer entry in Wikipedia, 2013.
¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 Wikipedians are justifiably concerned about individuals (and other entities, from garage bands to corporations) attempting to use the site for promotional purposes. But these editorial debates over Native American public figures allow students to see that this concern can also have racial and political overtones. In the DeMeyer case, at least, some editors appear to be sensitive to the proposition that "notability" itself is not an apolitical concept (unlike "duffbeerforme," who seemed unwilling to entertain the idea that the Native American Journalists Association was not just some fringe entity). And here was another powerful lesson for students: editors are often not objective, or informed, or even that smart. They carry their own agendas, no matter how "neutral" they may claim or try to be.
¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 DeMeyer was one of a handful of Native authors whom I was able to bring into my class (others emailed, or Skyped with the students). By the time she visited, students had some insight into the forces that keep indigenous literature and indigenous issues invisible. They were impressed, and surprised, by her career, her productivity, her connections and her knowledge. Their surprise is only partly attributable, I think, to their youth, or to their location at a public university in New Hampshire. Settler colonial society, of which the United States is undeniably one, has to do a great deal of work to keep indigenous presence invisible. Spring 2013 was the heyday of #IdleNoMore and the Violence Against Women Act, indigenous issues that received only modest coverage in "notable" sources like The New York Times. 26 When I required students to follow these issues on Twitter, they found huge numbers of Native American people (indeed, images of huge Native American crowds), using social media, fighting for sovereignty, speaking their languages, protecting their traditional homelands, and writing. But to find those, of course, they had to bother to look.
¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 3 Wikipedia's "notability" standard mimics the centrifugal force exercised by literary canons, even within such ostensibly canon-busting fields as Native American literary studies. In the context of a course on 21st Century Native American Literature, this was a critical lesson. Our class started with novels by Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich, who have published with major houses; moved on to Craig Womack's beautiful novel, Drowning in Fire, published by a university press; then to a poetry chapbook by Mihku Paul—part of the "Native New England Authors" series at Bowman Books, a Native publishing venture run by Joseph Bruchac and his son Jesse; and finally to a self-published memoir by Wampanoag elder Joan Tavares Avant. 27 I wanted students to think about the politics of Native publishing, to engage with the concerns articulated by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and others over non-Native aesthetic assumptions and mainstream publishing demands. These writers have found that the indigenous texts that garner the most critical and commercial success are those that most closely mimic Western literary aesthetics; tribal authors who express tribally-specific values in tribally-specific forms are often dismissed as "too political" or "too hard to follow." 28 At the end of our Alexie-to-Avant trajectory, most students were fully prepared to appreciate lesser-known Native writers from New England. But the argument made by Vizjim—that "numbers matter," and that tribal sovereignty is a reality worth respecting—is still just beginning to be heard on Wikipedia.
¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 2 Crowdsourced knowledge presents itself, deliberately, as contingent, as always subject to further input and revision. Wikipedia changes to reflect not only changing facts, like shifting national borders; it has the potential, too, to reflect shifting intellectual paradigms. In this respect, wikis are not unlike oral traditions, which in Native communities still carry enormous weight, even—interestingly—when it comes to preserving and transmitting literary history. There are writers who, like Joan Tavares Avant, are revered within their tribes and beyond, whose work is read and recited at public events, who are honored at community gatherings. 29 While they might not yet have attracted much attention from university-based scholars or mainstream publishers, Wikipedia offers one space in which students with the skills, access and time can mediate between Native authors and Wikipedia's own editors to improve the representation of Native culture and history. Indeed, Joseph Reagle has argued that Wikipedia is successful not as a technology (the wiki) but as a culture–a community of "good faith collaboration." 30 Entering this community together, students and indigenous authors can help ensure that Wikipedia represents the knowledge genuinely available, without simply replicating those sources considered, in a facile way, "notable."
¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 About the author: Siobhan Senier is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, and editor of Dawnland Voices: Writing from Indigenous New England (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) as well as Writing of Indigenous New England. She can be found on Twitter @ssenier, and in the blogosphere at http://indiginewenglandlit.wordpress.com/author/ssenier/.
¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 Notes:
¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0
Quite a few people have written or spoken about teaching with Wikipedia, most of them historians, including T. Mills Kelly, who has famously had his students write some hoaxes on the site (Yoni Appelbaum, "How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit," The Atlantic, May 15, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/how-the-professor-who-fooled-wikipedia-got-caught-by-reddit/257134/). For a discussion of pedagogical uses of Wikipedia in the context of college composition, see Robert E. Cummings, Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009). ↩
"Wikipedia: Five Pillars," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars. ↩
"Wikipedia:Administrators," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators&oldid=567726235. ↩
"Wikipedia:Protection Policy," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Protection_policy&oldid=567197436. ↩
For an engaging history of Wikipedia, see Andrew Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia (New York: Hyperion, 2009). ↩
"Wikipedia:School and University Projects," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects&oldid=565127934. ↩
Amanda Seligman, "Teaching Wikipedia Without Apologies," http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/teach/seligman-2012-spring/; Shawn Graham, "The Wikiblitz: A Wikipedia Editing Assignment in A First Year Undergraduate Class," http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/crowdsourcing/graham-2012-spring/. See also Adrea Lawrence, "Learning How to Write Analog and Digital History," http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/teach/lawrence-2012-spring/. ↩
Martha Saxton, "Wikipedia and Women's History: A Classroom Experience," http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/crowdsourcing/saxton-etal-2012-spring/. ↩
The "vanishing Indian" myth is particularly stubborn in New England. See Jean M. O'Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and Colin Gordon Calloway, After King Philip's War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997). ↩
"Samson Occom," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Samson_Occom&oldid=566410109."William Apess," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_Apess&oldid=564492835; "Joseph Bruchac," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Bruchac&oldid=559919036. ↩
Moya Z. Bailey, "Patriarchy Proves the Point of #tooFEW," Moya Bailey, accessed May 5, 2013, http://moyabailey.com/2013/02/26/toofew-feminists-engage-wikipedia-315-11-3-est/. ↩
THATCamp is The Humanities and Technology "unconference," which trains scholars and students in a variety of digital tools and practices, including Wikipedia editing. ↩
"Wikipedia:Meetup/Feminists Engage Wikipedia," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Meetup/Feminists_Engage_Wikipedia&oldid=548328074; Adeline Koh, "Tips for Participating in #TooFEW: Feminist People of Color Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon Today, 11am-3pm EST! – ProfHacker," The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 15, 2013; Fiona Barnett, "#tooFEW – Feminists Engage Wikipedia | HASTAC," HASTAC: Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, March 11, 2013, http://hastac.org/blogs/fionab/2013/03/11/toofew-feminists-engage-wikipedia; Adrianne Wadewitz, "Who Speaks for the Women of Wikipedia? Not the Women of Wikipedia. | HASTAC," HASTAC: Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, April 30, 2013, http://hastac.org/blogs/wadewitz/2013/04/30/who-speaks-women-wikipedia-not-women-wikipedia."#tooFEW Feminists Engage Wikipedia," Al Jazeera, March 7, 2013, The Stream, http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201303072321-0022594. ↩
Adeline Koh and Roopika Risam, "The Rewriting Wikipedia Project," Postcolonial Digital Humanities, accessed May 5, 2013, http://dhpoco.org/rewriting-wikipedia/. ↩
Ayush Khanna, "Nine Out of Ten Wikipedians Continue to Be Men: Editor Survey," Wikimedia Foundation Global Blog, April 27, 2012, http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/27/nine-out-of-ten-wikipedians-continue-to-be-men/.Nathalie Collida and Andreas Kolbe, "Wikipedia's Culture of Sexism – It's Not Just for Novelists. | Wikipediocracy," accessed May 9, 2013, http://wikipediocracy.com/2013/04/29/wikipedias-culture-of-sexism-its-not-just-for-novelists/. ↩
"Wikipedia:Notability," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Notability&oldid=562817535. ↩
"Cheryl Savageau," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cheryl_Savageau&oldid=561288574. ↩
ENG 739: American Indian Lit in the C21 (private class blog), April 21, 2013. ↩
"Wikipedia:Student Tutorial," Simple English Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, July 3, 2013, http://simple.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Student_tutorial&oldid=4482547. ↩
"Wikipedia:Sandbox," Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox&oldid=567952638. ↩
There are two ways to get an article "in" Wikipedia: one is to add it to the "Articles for Creation" queue; the other is to simply "create" it, by typing the desired entry heading and asking Wikipedia to allow the article. The former process can take days or even weeks, and some contributors feel that it leaves submissions open to more editorial caprice. See Adeline Koh and Roopika Risam, "How to Create Wikipedia Entries That Will Stick," Postcolonial Digital Humanities, accessed August 10, 2013, http://dhpoco.org/rewriting-wikipedia/how-to-create-wikipedia-entries-that-will-stick/. ↩
Roy Rosenzweig, "Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past," Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (June 2006): 117–46. ↩
"John Christian Hopkins," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Christian_Hopkins&oldid=564987519. ↩
"Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/John Christian Hopkins," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/John_Christian_Hopkins&oldid=552213787. I did weigh in, myself, during this debate; in a departure from usual Wikipedia practice, I choose not to remain anonymous, so I was up front about my role. The site's discussion system is actually not an easy one to game, despite the publicity lavished on cases like Sarah Palin's Tea Party supporters. And it can work surprisingly well: see, for instance, the talk page for the #tooFEW event, where editors who complained about a "special interest group intent on using Wikipedia to spread propaganda" and the "unreliability" of the "whole feminism movement" were quickly overruled by the community. In the interest of full disclosure I should add that, having "met" Vizjim through Wikipedia's talk pages, I have since begun to collaborate with him on another essay about Native American literature on the site. ↩
"Trace DeMeyer," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trace_DeMeyer&oldid=562418785. ↩
A respectable introduction to Idle No More can be found, indeed, on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idle_No_More. The New York Times did include a powerful op-ed on VAWA by Ojibwe novelist Louise Erdrich: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/opinion/native-americans-and-the-violence-against-women-act.html?_r=0 ↩
Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2009); Louise Erdrich, The Round House (New York, NY: Harper, 2012). Craig S Womack, Drowning in Fire (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001); Mihku Paul, 20th Century Powwow Playland (Greenfield Center, N.Y.: Bowman Books, 2012); Joan Tavares Avant, People of the First Light: Wisdoms of a Mashpee Wampanoag Elder (West Barnstable, MA: West Barnstable Press, 2010). ↩
See especially the essay, "The American Indian Fiction Writers: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, the Third World, and First Nation Sovereignty" in Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 78-98. ↩
"Joan Tavares Avant," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joan_Tavares_Avant&oldid=554359537; Other entries produced by our class include "Linda Coombs," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Linda_Coombs&oldid=554559711; "Loren Spears," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Loren_Spears&oldid=561285183; "Stephanie Fielding," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stephanie_Fielding&oldid=567070076; "Donna Caruso," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donna_Caruso&oldid=554839719; "Donna M. Loring," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donna_M._Loring&oldid=559588552; "Charles Norman Shay," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Norman_Shay&oldid=560376795; "Mihku Paul," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mihku_Paul&oldid=564203851; "Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Melissa_Tantaquidgeon_Zobel&oldid=554555368 and "Larry Spotted Crow Mann," http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larry_Spotted_Crow_Mann&oldid=565962268. ↩
Joseph Michael Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010). ↩
11 Comments on the whole Page
Alisea Williams McLeod September 17, 2013 at 12:35 am
Siobhan,
I very much enjoyed reading your essay. I have no criticisms. I am intrigued by your title, on both sides of the colon. I wonder specifically about "student accountability." What would make students accountable to Native authors? Is it that student-researchers and writers, as part of their coursework and authorship of Wikipedia articles, must play a role in expanding the Wikipedia canon? Do you, in other words, see them as having literary, social, and political responsibilities to expand Wikipedia's coverage? If so, is this kind of informed and informative citizenship limited to the classroom, or is there a larger ethic at work that has implications beyond. For instance, one might ask if people who witness a human atrocity without acting on behalf of its victims are in theory accountable. Do you, in this way, see your students as accountable to Native American authors, Americans in general, the world, etc. if they fail to participate in the movement of these various authors from margins to center, or, better put, from their localities to the mainstream?
Kristen Nawrotzki September 17, 2013 at 6:45 am
((Nodding vigorously)) to Alisea's questions. Can you tell us more about accountability in the essay text? I only see a version of it ("accountable" once, in paragraph 10, and I can't tell how you define it. I'm also curious whether it's a characteristic the students bring with them, or whether it's something you think they learn through this process.
Holly Oberle September 23, 2013 at 5:44 pm
I want to echo the comments above…such a wonderful essay and a contribution that makes a forceful case for web writing. I learned a lot myself from reading it, not only about Wikipedia and web writing itself, but also about Native American authors.
Amanda Seligman October 20, 2013 at 8:18 am
This is a terrific and helpful article. I will be assigning it in my spring 2014 Digital History graduate seminar. I can't think of anything else that I have read that really so effectively takes on Wikipedia's "notability" standard–to which I had not given much thought before.
David Cornsilk October 22, 2013 at 9:39 pm
You need to investigate the authenticity of people like Trace DeMeyer before insulting the Cherokee people by calling white people indigenous. Next time you want to check on the authenticity of a claimed indigenous writer, let me know. I'd be glad to help you out. [Editor's note: This comment has been edited to comply with our commenting policy.]
Siobhan Senier October 28, 2013 at 10:13 am
Alisea's questions are very thought-provoking and helpful. By "accountability," yes, I mean that students and everyone who uses or reads Wikipedia has a responsibility to improve it; and also that all citizens have a responsibility to "indigenize space"–to make indigenous and anti-colonial concerns visible and central. At this year's Critical Ethnic Studies conference in Chicago I heard Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman make this point very powerfully: that one need not necessarily be indigenous to "indigenize space," but that everyone implicated in a colonial system needs to take responsibility for putting anti-colonialism front and center.
For me, "accountability" therefore means more than just "representing" indigenous people and cultural production, and it means more than "engaging" Native community members–it means actively consulting with them. My students were not just adding "fan" entries to Wikipedia, but consulting with the authors and other community members continually as they wrote. This doesn't mean (as the last comment, above, clearly illustrates) that Native people always agree on everything. But just as we writers get to consult with readers in this CommentPress platform, so too did my students consult with Native people during their writing, trying, as best they could, to be accountable to those voices.
Jason Mittell October 28, 2013 at 4:18 pm
Just to concur – an excellent piece with some good suggestions for improvements from other commenters!
Leigh Wright October 30, 2013 at 10:55 am
Before reading this essay, I was one of the Wikipedia naysayers. As mentioned in one of the comments below, I had had a poor experience with Wikipedia and regarded it as a horrible source. However, I can see several interesting writing and verification assignments that could arise from Wikipedia for my students. I teach journalism, and thus, my students have to understand how to verify information. Most of their stories involve interviewing people and digging out documents at city hall or the courthouse. This could be useful to show them the rigors of verification. Interesting. I'll have to marinate this idea a bit.
Great essay!
David Golumbia October 31, 2013 at 9:13 am
This is a very well-written and carefully on an important topic and I don't think it needs many changes. My comments is somewhat general and may not be of much use. But I think the tone of the piece is a little bit more positive toward Wikipedia than is justified from my experience. For example, in para 3 you quote the "five pillars," of which the most interesting is number 5, which quite a few commentators have noted is rarely followed (can it even be followed?)–Nate Tkacz especially. It becomes a feint or excuse to impose some extremely rigid and at times arbitrary rules of power that in many ways contradict some basic assumptions about how the site works.
In a related vein, I don't think you dwell as long as I would on how very racist and sexist the Wikipedia community is. A couple commentators here say you make Wikipedia more compelling or attractive to academics, which in one way I support, but in another way I am a little concerned by the overall impression that Wikipedia is a good place to do work on indigenous peoples. It is–and yet I'm not so sure.
Part of that is a temporal dimension that you don't quite mention. What most concerns me about projects like yours is that over time, they are likely to be deleted in their entirety, due precisely to the racism and rigid anti-rule organization of the project. The hostile, often white male editors who can for whatever reason devote a huge amount of time to the site, taking particular areas under their wings as "their" domain, simply wait out the interventions of people whose politics they don't like. Then, once we (inevitably) disengage, they delete all the pages they don't like due to "notability" criteria or lack of sources or whatever. I'd like to see the material in this paper revisited in 2 or 3 years to see how much of what is done remains–I'd be pleased, but surprised, if most of it persists.
That gives the piece a bit of "here's what finally happened" quality that I think gives Wikipedia too much credit. There is never any "final," and very often, over time, efforts to fight the deeply conservative bias of much of Wikipedia get overcome attrition.
I'll be happy to be wrong, and in some cases I certainly am wrong, and maybe things are changing, but I remain very concerned about the problem I describe.
David Golumbia October 31, 2013 at 10:29 am
apologies for the exceedingly poor editing of my hastily-typed comment…
by the Editors March 19, 2014 at 9:34 am
Your essay, "Indigenizing Wikipedia," has been accepted (with revisions) for the final draft of this volume. Several readers raised insightful questions that we encourage you to address in your revisions, such as Alisea Williams McLeod's comment about accountability and your response about engagement. Adrianne Wadewitz recommended that you mention how Wikipedians have worked to reduce gender bias before many academics recognized this issue. Several readers greatly appreciated how you shared your teaching steps (if you have more, please add or link to them), and your response to Jason Mittell's query about the ethics of consulting living subjects should be incorporated into the final draft. See also comments raised in the close reading of your draft by Amanda Seligman and Kate Singer, which would be ideal to address if space permits.
The current draft word count is 3783 (as measured by WordPress), and the final version should not exceed 3800, so think carefully about making cuts as well as additions. The deadline for submitting your final draft is Thursday May 15th, though sooner is always better. This is a firm deadline, and if you do not meet it, we cannot guarantee that your essay will advance to the final volume. In the next few days, we will post further instructions on how to resubmit and edit your text in our PressBooks/WordPress platform.
6 Comments on paragraph 1
I really like the emphasis on being a facilitator rather than gatekeeper. This should be a running theme throughout the entire book in my opinion.
Elizabeth Switaj September 29, 2013 at 9:28 pm
Barbara Fister October 8, 2013 at 8:11 pm
Yes, excellent – as it happens I just told a student about it because it's likely to be vry useful for a project she's working on in a gender studies course, looking at how library categories and curation work (and don't work) and how those issues persist in digital spaces.
1. In sentence 2, I'm confused about the word "author"–that means the Native American author, not the student author, right? This implies that somehow you got the Native American authors involved in your class.
2. In sentence 4, I think you want "fleshed" out not "flushed" out.
Thanks Amanda! I did mean "Native authors," so will clarify that. And I did actually mean "flush out," in the sense that we drove some of Wikipedia's subtler problems out into the open.
Amanda Seligman March 25, 2014 at 2:24 pm
On re-reading this for my class, I can see that you definitely meant flushed. Sorry for the original misread!
I am glad to see this list. For years, I have railed against the usage of Wikipedia in my own classroom and in the classrooms of my middle-school age son. I was under the incorrect impression that it was a you-post-it and it's-there-for-the-world-to-see deal without any level of oversight. One of my former bosses posted his bio on the site and was quite proud of his accomplishment. I think that's what left such a sour taste in my mouth about Wikipedia. He was not an important figure in American history. Thankfully, Wikipedia did take the posting down.
On re-reading this I'm fascinated by point 1. I agree that "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia." As a long-time encyclopedia writer and now editor, however, I disagree with the parenthetical as applied generally to encyclopedias. Academic encyclopedias often are based on primary research; and interpretation is a form of a opinion. An informed form, but certainly a form.
Adrianne Wadewitz March 25, 2014 at 2:30 pm
Academic encyclopedias are very different from Wikipedia, however, and it is crucial t make this distinction. One of Wikipedia's core policies is that it only summarizes secondary research and does not offer original research.
Also doesn't permit original research…
Adrianne Wadewitz September 16, 2013 at 12:15 pm
Most of the imbalances in Wikipedia are quite predictable. Your example of Bieber vs. Wilma Mankiller is hardly bizarre. The majority of people who have free time to edit Wikipedia (young people in the US) are more interested in Bieber than Wilma Mankiller. Understanding the editor demographics helps you understand what is on Wikipedia. 90% of Wikipedia's editors are male, for example. That shapes the encyclopedia.
A better word than "bizarre" here might be "troubling", and a discussion of the demographics of Wikipedia editors would definitely help contextualize the issue.
In a comment on the last paragraph of this essay, I ask about the distinction between notability and significance. This paragraph is one place to weave in that idea. Notability is much more about celebrity, and significance about long-term importance.
Trip Kirkpatrick October 18, 2013 at 10:48 am
Sadly, I don't think it's accurate that irrelevant/inappropriate content is inserted only by "high school students". Put another way, accounting for inappropriate content by saying that it's done by high school students papers over the wide range of vandals' backgrounds, possibly helping to further, in a small way, the perception of trolls as essentially harmless teenage boys in their bedrooms.
I'm confused by the reference to Justin Bieber's page being on lockdown. Perhaps sometimes it is, but at the moment it doesn't seem to be. Can you add the word "sometimes" to the parenthetical?
Helpful, thank you!
I might suggest elaborating a bit more on what you mean by "blitz" editing.
Frank Vitale IV October 13, 2013 at 3:20 pm
I think your point on Wikipedia embracing its use as a pedagogical tool is interesting. You may want to elaborate on what you see as proper use of the site as a teaching aid. Your first footnote gives reference to the assignments of Professor T. Mills Kelly, but you don't touch on whether this is a good use of the website or not. I don't think you should go into an extended discussion of web ethics, but I think the issue is worth mentioning.
Thank you for including the link to the School and University Projects page, which I did not know about (despite being cited by name in this paragraph! thanks for that too!).
Not only is Wikipedia and other crowd sourced versions of history likely to be male-biased and potentially racist, there is also a problem concerning the authors on Wikipedia, which are predominately white men, and the removal of female American writers from a list of American writers. You might be interested in this link if you're not familiar with this debate: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/apr/29/wikipedia-women-problem/.
This is a compelling paragraph, especially the last sentence.
It is perhaps new within academia to care about systemic bias in Wikipedia, but there have been efforts underway for years on Wikipedia to remedy these problems. Ignoring them and privileging only what professors have done wipes out the history of those of us on Wikipedia have been doing. Academics did not suddenly "discover" the problems on Wikipedia and rush to fix it. Wikipedians have known about them for a long and time and have been working tirelessly to fix them. The gender gap outreach efforts, for example, started with a WikiChix lunch years ago at Wikimania and have had at least 3-4 years of sustained, funded efforts to help improve the gender problems you discuss.
Whoopss…I spoke too soon. Please ignore my previous comment on the paragraph above. But I'm so very glad to see this issue addressed in this book!
Siobhan Senier September 24, 2013 at 1:34 pm
Point taken, Adrianne! Thank you SO much for weighing in!
Kate Singer September 16, 2013 at 7:00 pm
This paragraph about accountability renders the Wikipedia assignment more compelling than I've heard argued in the past. The standards also seem to alleviate the instructor's role as possible grammar police….
Great paragraph, good points, rare academic praise for Wikipedia.
I bet the Wikipedia editor comments made the students think more critically about their writing and strive to improve it. Students might be like children. We can tell them something over and over, but once they hear it from an outside source, it sticks. This essay is so interesting and might make this tough recovering reporter rethink Wikipedia.
4 Comments on paragraph 10
This is very compelling! I wonder how those of us who choose to blog can make this case to our students…in my experience students do not believe that their blog will be read by anyone but themselves.
I wonder at times about that as well. However, several times in my classes, students have reported that strangers have commented on their posts. At first, they are a bit creeped out, but then they realize they are reaching an audience somewhere. One of my class blogs (more of a vlog than blog) has had clicks from Russia and Thailand.
Also, love the idea that the feedback comes from Wikipedia in 20 minutes. These students are so accustomed to a fast-paced world. I wish I could grade assignments that quickly!
As an extension of Holly Oberle's point, I think that the reactions you garnered as a result of Wikipedia work are very interesting compared to student reactions I have seen to blog projects. I think that today's students are not accustomed to being a single individual, but are rather used to being a cog in a larger system (something akin to the sharing that occurs on sites like Twitter and Tumblr). There is a lot of literature out there about this very topic, and I wonder what everyone's thoughts are regarding the community nature of Wikipedia as opposed to the individualized nature of the blog.
I think you need one more sentences after the "more profoundly" sentence. The excellent student quotation does not fit well with the first part of the paragraph about timing of response.
This is a great paragraph! Successful Wikipedia assignments always have this step-by-step structure! Thanks for showing yours!
Steve Safran '90 September 19, 2013 at 10:37 pm
This is an excellent primer – not just for the students, but for the audience as a whole. Most people wrongly assume editing Wikipedia is a lark – so good job showing just how hard and rigorous it is.
I also love this setup but I'm also wondering how one might go about producing content on a deceased author? And was there any difficulty between the student and the authors? Were there any students that were unwilling to participate? I can imagine that writing an article about someone you've had contact with might be a very intimidating process!
This sequence is great and very helpful. When I revise my essay, I intend to link to it in my discussion of Wikipedia-based assignments.
I would suggest moving the parenthetical comment about the Native authors up to the beginning of the paper as an explanation. I'm also eager to know about their responses to the student papers.
I wonder if it's worth reflecting a bit on the ethical issue of consulting with the subject you're writing about. I know that WP has guidelines to ensure that people are not writing their own biographies (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autobiography ), and the edict against original research might apply to interviewing the subject. Is it worth discussing these issues here?
Siobhan Senier October 29, 2013 at 8:54 am
Grin. I was kind of wondering whether someone would raise this issue, Jason. In practice, very few of the Native authors were hands-on or directive; they were, however, HELPFUL in providing pointers to print information that was hard to find, or even public-domain photographs. But yes, people have addressed this issue (e.g., of Wikipedia subjects–even corporations, not just individuals–silently "deputizing" writers to create entries for them), and I can add a few references there.
I love the sentence about the deadlines and students that are accustomed to cranking out a paper the night before and accepting a mediocre grade. Perhaps this assignment will show students the value of working ahead. Planning their work and working their plan. Plus, with an outside source that proposes deletion, it gives them that very real world experience that poor planning and execution that might fly in some (not all, please don't get mad but we know a class or two that is not as rigorous as others) college classes doesn't fly in the real world.
There is a lot going on in this paragraph.
I got stuck on the sentence beginning "like many college professors." I'm not totally sure I understand that. Do you mean both Wikipedia and college professors valorize information published in print sources like newspapers, magazines, and scholarly books and journals over tribal websites? For what ends, I would ask? I would disaggregate this a bit more–college professors value scholarly books and journals over newspapers and magazine articles for certain kinds of activities but not for others.
Also, what's going on in the last sentence (the Rosenzweig quotation) doesn't fit with the first part of the paragraph. The first part of the paragraph is about meeting a notability standard–if there aren't traditional publications about the person, then they don't count (from Wikipedia's point of view). But the Rosenzweig quotation is about quality, not a count of whether books or articles exist about a person.
Good reading, Amanda, thank you very much!
1 Comment on paragraph 13
I'm a journalism professor. I love this part. I hope that the feedback from Wikipedia spurred them to do better research and writing … that they dug through documents and stacks for research and rose above the "local puff" that was mentioned.
Could you show how having Wikipedia articles changed how the internet perceived of the people whose articles you created? I've often found that once a Wikipedia article is created the text is copied on many sites – this would show how important the notability criteria is. Its effects are not just internal to Wikipedia.
This debate about notability has me wondering whether it spawned any class discussion about distinction, aesthetics, or alternative arguments for canon creation among Native American authors?
Adrienne, that's a really nice point. The Wikipedia entries have certainly been a point of pride for many within the Native community. Kate, our whole semester was basically devoted to questions of canonicity!! :)
Did you have students back up, or turn in non-Wikipedia copies of their work to you–so you had it even if deleted online?
Wikipedia does keep every single version of every single change; but yes, I strongly encouraged them to draft in Word, and export their essays periodically, etc. . .I talk to them quite a bit about backup, since shockingly few of them seem to do it!
It might be good to compare what Wikipedia has about Erdrich and Alexie to the authors you had your students write about, as I know it is a lot more. It would add force to your point in this paragraph.
Agreed – just word counts & longevity of the entries would contrast effectively.
Great, yes!
By the end of this essay, I was looking for you to make a distinction between Wikipedia's idea of "notability" and the scholarly notion of "significance." I wonder how these articulate.
Food for thought. In Wikipedia parlance, "notability" is more pragmatic and recursive: HAS this subject been noted? On the face of it at least, it presents as less judgmental and canon-making than "significance." But I will keep thinking about this, and try to import a quotation or two about "notability."
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Amanda Seligman
See in context
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Leigh Wright
Recent Comments in this Document
I just wanted to check in with an observation about how I am re-reading the essays that I've assigned in my grad seminar.
It's tricky to figure out how to read when you have both the main article and the comments available, and you know there is a conversation about the essay going on in the comments. I seem to find myself reading the comments through first (including sometimes getting distracted by links embedded in them) and then going back to the essay. I'm not sure I would do it the same way if I hadn't read the essays before. I've also noticed as I read the essays published in the Writing History in the Digital Age project volume that I miss the comments.
The editors invite you to revise & resubmit your essay, "Learning to Write at a Distance," for the final draft of this volume. We agree with commenters who described your piece as a thought-provoking, playful, good read that challenged our assumptions about video games as tools for teaching writing in a liberal arts context. It's a surprising, unconventional essay, and that's what we like about it. Nevertheless, our readers offered many suggestions for ways to revise the next draft and to communicate your ideas more clearly with audiences who may be unfamiliar with the terrain.
First, based on your response to Amanda Seligman, we recommend that you draw out the meaning of the current title somewhere near the front of the essay, or change the title. Your second idea about "Writing Algorithmically" sounds mechanistic and doesn't capture the spirit of "playing" that Barbara Fister described. On a related point, you may be helpful to draw out the introductory argument more clearly, based on Meredith Safran's comment.
Second, as Jason Mittell and others suggested, tell us more about the course, what students learned, and the student project that exceeded your expectations. Paragraph 22 of the first draft disappointed our readers. Incorporating links to your syllabus and other learning materials would be an efficient way to do this within our word-count constraints.
We appreciate your responses to commenters during the open peer review, and hope that you can balance our request for further elaboration with the playful spirit of the original draft.
Oh, and can you do all of this in under 3,000 words? We bet you can.
Your essay, "How We Learned to Drop the Quiz," has been accepted (with revisions) for the final draft of this volume. Our readers agreed that this was a strong, well-written piece that forced many of us to rethink our assumptions about the possibilities of teaching in an online asynchronous class. We also wish to highlight suggestions for revising your final draft.
First, as Jason Mittell recommended, it would be wise to clarify the argument in your introduction that multiple-choice quiz assessment did not align with your goal for historical thinking. Making this revision would avoid confusing readers who may believe that your essay argues against multiple-choice quizzes in all settings. See also comments by Meredith Safran and others.
Second, in your response to Kate Singer, you briefly described how learning also happens through digital back-channels, and it would be helpful to explain and show more of this to our readers, if relevant to your overall argument.
Third, in your response to Jason, you indicated that you may have some evidence on whether your higher-ed model is influencing how K-12 educators teach historical thinking to their students, and we encourage you to elaborate further on this, even if it is preliminary material.
Finally, several readers desired more background information about your students, how many began vs. completed this course, how much faculty time this method required, and definitions of terms that may not be familiar to all (such as asynchronous, back-channel, and iterative learning). Also, we realize that this essay relates to larger questions about online learning in higher ed, which are beyond its scope, but pointing readers to further reading would be appreciated.
Jason, as we have discussed, the editors have accepted your essay, "There Are No New Directions in Annotations" for the final volume, with the expectation that you will revise it in light of the comments received here.
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Skip to the end for making details.
Like most worthy pursuits, the making was both maddening and a joy. Without a single straight line in the design, I had to be meticulous in the planning of every step, much more so than normal as most tasks resulted in the removal of a flat working surface, leaving fewer and fewer reference surfaces to work off.
Usually straightforward procedures – such as following the general rule of bringing timber down to final dimension over time to allow for wood movement – were also complicated and time consuming. Having said that, however, the design's organic form and little use of jointing meant that any unplanned wood movement that did occur was imperceptible in the end.
The size and shapes of the components meant I couldn't use the jointer for flattening, having to resort to using a router ski that slid along on top of the torsion box. As I didn't have a spindle moulder, this router ski was also used to template-trim the frame's width, but resulted in at least an additional week's worth of exhausting work.
Having documented the detailed design in CAD meant I could get the MDF templates, forms and guides cut by CNC down the road, however it became clear quite quickly that my curves that looked ok in CAD were in some places not perfect sweeping arcs in the finished templates. It wasn't the CNC's fault – I just hadn't smoothed out some of the nodes enough, leaving me to spend a day reworking the router-cut edge by hand.
By far the biggest challenge on this piece has to be the modest concave curve that sweeps through the face of both frames (this curve is imperceptible on photos except for the below top-down perspective shot, look closely at the junction of the frame and table).
Initially I was planning on using a router cradle swinging on a pendulum that was limited to movement in one plane but after several attempts the rig didn't feel safe enough to use for long periods, so in the end I decided to use it only for establishing the reference depth at points along the frame and then take the bulk off using an Arbortech planner cutter on an angle grinder. The risk with this tool is the speed at which you can take off material as you can quickly go past your finished dimension. As it is a freehand power tool, the quality of the surface is limited by how controlled your sweeping movements are. Even my lightest use required days of follow up using a short flat rasp and sanding using 40 grit. A compass plan could potentially have helped had I bought one, but this would only help in the horizontal plane across the concave, not along the length of the concave.
The rebating of the mirror was straight forward enough, again using the router ski to freehand route up to a pencil line trace off the mirror. In hindsight, I'd cut the mirror after having the frame nearly complete, as there are some parts where the tolerance was less than 5mm between the inside of the rebate and the outside of the frame. The three metal brackets I had cut and made up by a local fabricator, and while I think their work was excellent, for the cost I think it was overkill and I could've made these up myself.
The frame's finished thickness is up to 70mm thick, which allows for a subtle contrast with the thinner parts of the frame towards the centre and bottom. Standard commercial thicknesses typically maxes out at around 50mm in Australia, which meant I had to source a slab, as I didn't want to laminate up to get the required thickness. After a long search I found a 250kg slab of 100mm spotted gum. Most slabs are from small scale specialists who find big 'paddock' trees that, while enormous, have more 'shake' (cracks) than forestry derived trees as they are more prone to wind stress. However, considering the natural/organic themes of the brief and the final design, the shake (once filled with dark epoxy) actually complimented the piece, adding to other striking features such as the the gum lines that run radially through the timber (you can see these come to the surface at a tangent in one of the photos of the frames detail.
I'm very satisfied with the piece but had underestimated the time to complete some of critical steps due to the size of the components. However, in the end, the proof is in the client's reaction, and I hope they'll agree eight months is a short time to wait for a piece that will last generations.


text:
BOC steht für:

 Baltisches Orgel-Centrum
 Bank of Canada
 Bank of China
 Binary Offset Carrier, spezielles Frequenzbandspreizungsverfahren im Funkverkehr
 Blue Öyster Cult, amerikanische Hardrock-Band
 den Flughafen Bocas del Toro in Panama nach dem IATA-Flughafencode
 BOC (Unternehmen), britisches Industriegaseunternehmen, heute Teil der Linde AG
 Bestimmbare Organische Chemikalie, jede nicht in den Chemikalienlisten des BAFA genannte Chemikalie, die durch ihre chemische Bezeichnung oder Strukturformel charakterisierbar ist

BoC steht für:
 Boards of Canada, schottisches Musikduo

BO-C steht für:
 Departamento Cochabamba, Bolivien nach ISO-3166-2

Boc steht als Abkürzung für:
 Boc-Schutzgruppe (tert-Butyloxycarbonyl), Schutzgruppe in der organischen Chemie

Boc ist der Nachname folgender Personen:
 Alexandru Boc (* 1946), rumänischer Fußballspieler
 Emil Boc (* 1966), rumänischer Politiker

Boč steht für:
 Boč, Ortsteil von Stráž nad Ohří, Tschechien
 Boč (Berg), Berg in der Nähe von Poljčane im östlichen Teil Sloweniens

Siehe auch:
 Bok
 Bock

Abkürzung

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Call Clooney!
No Agenda Show
1201 John's Story Time (2019-12-22)
0:00:34 "Nil from Buzzkill" weather report; intro to JCD story compilation by Sir Ruppenwaffles
0:02:07 JCD story compilation project proposal, massive bruise from shooting elephant gun (788@2:46:18)
0:05:29 "I took my motorcycle up to Tahoe" to see B.B. King, gorgeous hitchhiker repulsed by hypothermic babbling (672@1:45:33)
0:08:23 Abolitionist Cassius Clay's mansion with personal self-defense cannon (1@0:09:59)
0:09:58 Planted screamer at Led Zeppelin concert (7@0:11:39)
0:11:22 1920s book plugging vasectomy for a youthful look (23@1:03:02)
0:13:36 Dutch name butchery compilation
0:16:01 Lisa Monaco's porn name, "give it up for Raven!" (555@1:30:20)
0:17:30 "Straight from Receda, here she is, Raven, give it up!" (558@1:53:12)
0:18:01 Club 33 "oh my Sharona" (569@2:05:11)
0:19:29 White wine vinegar with tarragon (8@0:51:04)
0:20:13 PG Tips and British tea deals, complex history of Boston Tea Party (4@0:02:53)
0:21:15 Kicked out of MIT Media Lab by Marvin Minsky (1166@0:16:05)
0:23:54 JCD runs into former booker at Ritz Carlton (7@0:04:55)
0:25:36 Female CEOs like Carly Fiorina using "by and large" (8@0:01:52)
0:26:54 Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens "running and running" review (785@0:25:41)
0:31:59 whoa whoa whoa JCD eats a "giant locust" corn nut
0:33:41 Dirty Thirties: "Roscoe" = firearm (1028@2:31:30)
0:39:16 Choosing black checkers at Target, clueless Chinese student's card reader struggle (784:2:11:51)
0:42:16 "Pest" bald eagles and seagull-eating golden eagle (738@2:24:18)
0:44:49 Video Poker Tutor software (12@0:01:54)
0:46:38 Mimi's visit with dogs and "dry goods" after 15 hours of No Agenda (880@1:06:45)
0:49:18 Airline nut-fisting and giant backpack pet peeves (722@0:00:48)
0:52:42 Donation Segment
0:55:17 Nut-fisting porn (903@2:12:13)
0:56:58 Argentine ants in California (23@0:55:32)
0:59:24 Shantytown checklist (1170@2:27:03)
1:04:04 Microsoft's hooker account during the 1980s (1164@0:35:02)
1:07:14 Chili-eating challenge at Brazilian churrascaria (11@0:07:21)
1:11:14 The Site with Soledad O'Brien dumped by MSNBC in favor of 24/7 Princess Diana coverage (5@0:06:40)
1:14:17 Design plans for The Homelessness Experience at Walt Disney World (1169@0:58:13)
1:17:09 Best of Show with Fred Willard, handicapped skateboarder joke (9@0:46:28)
1:19:00 JCD's Comcast "worse than ISIS" squirrel woes fixed (695@0:01:24)
1:21:23 "A4 paper is ugly!" (615@2:11:21)
1:22:49 "A4 is tall and thin like Adam, not fat and chubby like John!"
1:23:21 Norman Lear's evil Republican Archie Bunker (880@0:50:35)
1:28:23 ShellCast taco podcast skit (1166@2:24:03)
1:30:39 The Dirty Thirties jingle with ACC the carnival barker, "Chicago typewriter" & "cinder dick" (1031@1:27:57)
1:35:58 "Nerd" traced to If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss (203@0:02:49)
1:38:03 Cynical character at party calling out Silicon Valley as scam (7@0:27:00)
1:39:09 Columbus police entrap firefighter with topless sunbather in park, 300 arrests by transit police leaving valuables in stations (10@0:13:42)
1:42:14 How to vandalize a Ring doorbell (1168@1:50:27)
1:46:31 ACC's Shark Tank invitation; reality show "that person is…" commercial breaks (960@1:36:00)
1:49:49 Song from talentless mockingbird on chimney (704@2:48:26)
1:52:27 Laundry detergent tip: "always get the liquid" (886@2:42:24)
1:55:56 Throwing toilet paper rolls at model UN conference (1162@0:51:13)
1:58:12 Sales pitch for $500 car wax job (1162@0:58:52)
2:02:08 Danni's Hard Drive (2@0:19:40)
2:02:53 Infused bison grass and hot pepper vodkas, Kirkland = Grey Goose (863@2:55:19)
2:05:27 International Geophysical Year and plate tectonics of South America and Africa (1168@0:12:20)
2:07:14 ACC: "40 minutes is pretty much the max" (1@0:36:36)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl