"We are Not in a Post-Fact World": Wikipedia and the Construction of Knowledge

Catalog description

Where do you get your information? Do you trust it? How do you assess the credibility and reliability of what you read, see, and hear? We interrogate these questions through the hands-on work of writing, editing, and commenting on articles in Wikipedia. We join arguably the largest collaborative writing project in history, comprising 309 language editions and with more than 38 million registered users in the English language version alone. This work (and play) allows us to investigate key issues in research methods: identifying gaps in existing knowledge, locating and accessing public records and archival materials, and assessing and attributing sources. Perhaps most important of all, we will write to an authentic audience of readers who, as they say in Wikipedia, will “speak back” to what you write and edit. We also address some perennial themes of rhetoric and composition: genre, audience, style, structure and organization, and more. Alongside this work, we examine the larger question of how knowledge is constructed. Who has access to information? How is access to information controlled or “disciplined”? What perspectives are overrepresented or underrepresented in the texts (written, visual, audible) we encounter and engage with? How does a particular knowledge source shape or influence public knowledge or culture?