Wikipedia has become one of the most used resources on the Internet today. It is often the first non-search website a person goes when researching a given topic. While sometimes innacurate and often contested, Wikipedia is proof that crowd-sourced content is viable and accurate.
As part of my English 253 class, we have been tasked with re-writing the Wikipedia entry for Lafayette College. I am part of the Introduction and History group. We will be working to re-write the introduction and ensure that the history of the college contains relevant and neutral information as per the guidelines for a Good Article entry. Of course, with an almost 200 year history, it seems unlikely that every event will be added. Instead, we hope to add what can be considered relevant and important events. This, however, lends its own problems as the very act of choosing those history entries can be considered a non-neutral view.
The current introduction to the entry seems to start off strong and neutral, but degenerates quickly into language appropriate for the front of a college brochure. The first paragraph seems to be quire neutral and contains pertinent information. I don’t see a reason to make any changes to the very beginning. The next paragraph seems to be entirely problematic. It starts out with a comment about the student body, very fact based. From there it jumps into a variety of rankings from prominent publications. While these may be facts, their presence in the introductory paragraph seems to color this as positive spin for the college rather than mere factual information. It makes the entry appear to be non-neutral which is something we need to resolve.
I made a few changes to the introduction to clean it up a bit and split off the questionable content into its own paragraph. I also moved the Alison Byerly announcement, which seems appropriate, into its own paragraph. I also added a comment about who she is replacing. I’m curious if these changes will persist or if a third party will revert them. I also added myself as a watcher on the page. This should alert me to any changes made from here on out.
Last Wednesday, 2/20/13, our class met with the college archivist, Diane Shaw. She gave a presentation on the college’s history, during which I took a few pages of notes. I summarized and added these notes to the Talk page for the Lafayette College Wikipedia entry. My hope is that having that information there as a guide, we can refer back to them as we make our changes. Additionally, I emailed my content addition to my group and then was able to meet with one of our group members on Friday during class.
I believe we’re going to meet a few more times in order to organize our thoughts and determine how we are going to proceed with the rewrite of the page. From my perspective, if we keep to factual information only, it won’t be much of a problem. Being a technical writer, I don’t find presenting factual information like this in a neutral tone to be very difficult. Provided I don’t add any additional commentary, that is.
I think whether or not changes to the second paragraph are contested will be one of the more interesting aspects of this entire project. It shows how ideologically loaded “facts” can be. Although it is a “fact” that those publications ranked Lafayette they way that they did, I think it is also clearly the case that when looked at holistically they are (should be?) a very minor part of information about the college. We’ll see.
Of course, there are those that think more of the “prestige” of a college than anything else. And rankings definitely fit into that prestige factor for many. There seems to have been no activity “against” what we are doing, thus far, so it may be that the page is not monitored as we initially thought it may be.