Abfinard

Prep Assingment

Assessing Wikipedia's Information on Chen Duxiu

Chen Duxiu has a fairly extensive Wikipedia article devoted to him. His biographical information seems to be extensive and fairly comprehensive. He has a helpful and complete "quick facts" bar on the right. The "Chronology" section is detailed and references important dates and movements, from his early life to his death in 1942. However, the page is lacking in an exploration of Chen's important philosophical thought. Not only does the article not explore his actual arguments, it fails to even mention that he was an important figure in the field of philosophical thought. The closest the article gets to mentioning this is in its subheading "Literature", which in and of itself shows that the emphasis is not on philosophy, but rather is "writings". His thought is not being framed in terms of philosophy, and therefore readers will not think of him in those terms. Based on our readings and discussions in-class discussions I think this would be a mistake. The section "Intellectual contributions and disputes" is brief and bullet points a few of Chen's main arguments, but fails to engage in a discussion of the controversy surrounding his thoughts.

Assessing Wikipedia's Information on the Chinese New Left

Wikipedia's page on The Chinese New Left is lacking.

• There is only one heading entitled "Overview"
  • There are only 4 sub-headings
    • The Name
    • Groups
    • Zhengzhou Incident
    • Land Issues
• The headings do not cover the scope of the topic
  • It does not mention many of the influential thinkers we have been reading and talking about
  • The topics that are mentioned lead readers to have an unbalanced view of the topic
    • Lack of mentioning something in an Wikipedia article can be comparable to having false information in the article because it is generally someone's first introduction to the topic and they may not think to research topics that are not mentioned

Assessing Wikipedia's Information on Mao Zedong

There is a lot of information in the Mao Zedong Wikipedia article. However, there is so much information - blocks of paragraphs upon paragraphs - that it is difficult to digest the information. I think the article might be more effective if it were organized better and split into more sections. This is difficult to achieve on Wikipedia because each article has so many different authors. What the article is lacking is a coherence that ties it together, a thesis statement, if you will. Because of the lack of one central idea, only ideas that are easily organized into different headings will be split up, for example the "Genealogy" section in the Mao article - split into "Ancestors", "Wives", "Siblings" or "Children". However, what is more important to split up are the categories and ideas that don't fall into an organized structure easily. This is why good writing is difficult - because the writer must construct a framework for her thoughts. For example, the section on "Legacy" would benefit from being split up further into perhaps types of legacies, where he left his legacy, how he left it etc. and from being tied back to other section in the article, perhaps the section on "The Cultural Revolution". However, with so many authors and Wikipedia changing all the time, it's difficult to do this...

The Opportunities and Challenges of Writing a Wiki Article

I started to talk about this in the above section. I think the Wikipedia article can be difficult to digest and create because it has so many authors. Each author is making minute edits within her realm of knowledge an tacking on new information. I view it as a chain of information that gets longer, rather than a foundation of information that is building on itself in a circular, connected fashion. However, perhaps this is simply the nature of an encyclopedia entry... On the other hand, Wikipedia benefits from having multiple authors because it becomes a place for the free exchange of many different kinds of ideas. It's democracy in its purest form - you literally have to have merits to contribute to Wikipedia. One could argue that only educated, privileged people are able to get published in print, and therefore a space like Wikipedia is important so that everyone has the opportunity to be heard.

When writing a Wikipedia article I will have to keep in mind that it is a starting point for information gathering, not a persuasive argument. In that sense, each section of the article will not build upon itself to prove one point. On the other hand, I hope that in my Wikipedia article I will be able to achieve more coherency than I have seen in some of the other articles. I think that a lack of connectedness makes it difficult to understand all the information and also may lead readers astray regarding what material is most important. If only the most accessible and easy material to discuss is written about the even if it is not the most important (or even correct!) it will take up more space in the Wiki article and therefore misrepresent the truth of matter. I think there is a balance to be found between writing a tight persuasive essay and writing a lagging, sloppy list of facts.