There were pros and cons to how I contributed to the wiki. Beyond what I was required to type for class I was put in charge of the formatting and editing. I am familiar with digital writing but building a wiki was a new concept for me. I picked it up quickly but I feel this wiki builder was not user friendly. I say this because a lot of the advanced design options I would have liked to explore were simply not offered. With this said it become painful going through all the pages trying to make them look as familiar to the other pages as possible. Since everyone was providing different content and posting it in a different way it became a tedious task. I gained an appreciation for the Wikipedia community as Wikipedia is highly standardized and everything is formatted relatively the same. I had trouble formatting and editing under a hundred pages I cannot imagine trying to fix Wikipedia with its hundred million plus pages.
The thing I am most proud of about the wiki is the fact we finished it. Most of us have never been involved in an office environment in which a large group of people need to collaborate to finish a project. From personal experience I have seen project groups waste a week or two deciding on what font and format to use in technical writing. Hence, the fact we even managed to pull this together is impressive as I have little experience with building a wiki which I believe I am not the only one unfamiliar with building a wiki. I was put in charge of making the wiki look presentable in terms of formatting and editing. Finishing on time is what I was most proud of again as I took on the task because I like the presentation side of digital writing. I am a firm believer that the presentation is equally if not more important than the content. I started to struggle when I realized the content being posted did not correlate to other pages. Wikipedia has a set model for people to follow we had a loose model which made figuring out an effective format difficult. Also, as a lot of online communities type like they are online the editing process requires a lot of work as rereading everything for spelling and grammar became equally tedious. I was proud not to offend anyone by moving content, fixing grammar, or correcting spelling. I think we did a great job on time management once again considering no one had built a wiki before. With more time I feel we could have made our jobs easier and clearer but as far as expanding out I don’t think much more content would have been added. In the age of free information it is easy to generate content it is making that content presentable and accessible that the problem lays. Not to be redundant the problem I encountered was trying to get fancy and use advance options that the wiki builder did not offer. The problem was easy to overcome as I just had to accept these limitations and make it work. I learned what I already knew I do not like collaborative writing. Not because I do not trust others to write but because I feel guilty about correcting others or taking a leadership role. I believe a lot of people have great ideas or could contribute more but choose not to because they fear the backlash of the group. I learned more that collaborative writing can be successful but it is difficult without a set structure to guide the collaborative process. The course outcomes are supposed to teach us about digital writing which even if our “wiki” failed it still does contain a decent chunk of information on digital writing. Also maybe we can learn more from our failures than our successes in this case we learned that online communities work harder than we anticipated showing that digital writing is a skill we need to learn. Digital writing is often overlooked as people now consider Facebook and Twitter digital writing. This project demonstrated there is a lot of merit to people who digital write and contribute to digital writing. The last part is not in the course outcomes but what I feel any course should teach which is how to apply these skills to getting a job. I have done a little technical writing in my life and deciding how to organize and summarize the information takes huge collaborative efforts and more emails than anyone cares to read. I learned maybe a wiki would be the best way to collaborate on these technical writing projects. Since, then we are all connected and can see what everyone is working on. The wiki did not “fail” in my opinion but rather showed us there is a lot we can take away from this class.
https://sites.google.com/site/odu307fall2012/system/app/pages/sitemap/hierarchy
From here I edited most of the pages and formatted them to be understandable and organized. I will admit getting acquainted with their software took a little longer than I anticipated but it is still easily usable.