TherealLiamplsc308
| This user is a student editor in Yale_University/Open_Democracy_(Spring_2021) . |
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editWeek 8 3/17-3/24--I have been away from this blog for a little while, and am going to post more regularly as the process moves forward. My project has developed immensely since my last post, in ways both good and bad, as I have more thoroughly explored the wikipedia article and broader literature about participatory planning. My first realization as I did a thorough examination of the current participatory planning page is that it is--at risk of sounding harsh--a bit of a mess. The page has not been meaningfully updated since 2010, and so is generally very out of date, and it is frustratingly disorganized. I spent a while playing with different plans to incrementally edit the page in order to improve it, but after a while I more or less concluded that the current page would be very very difficult to transform into a functional wikipedia article. With that in mind, I decided that the best approach might be for me to start from the ground up, and try to create a more functional page more or less from scratch. I have since been working to create an original draft for peer review. I do not intend the draft to be a fully complete article, and am not going to move it beyond my sandbox page for the time being, as I am more concerned at this point with finding an organizational framework of the article that will be more effective, and having my peer reviewers way in on the overall organization. I also intend to speak with Professor Landemore about what it means to recreate a Wikipedia article from scratch. It somehow feels undemocratic to clear out an existing article that has been created through a somewhat collaborative process, so I am not sure if this is an entirely appropriate approach, but I also am not sure how I would go about moving from the existing article to a really functional version.
As I have been doing the research to construct my new draft, I have stumbled upon another challenge. While deciding upon an article, my research into participatory planning yielded a ton of information--often in the form of articles and handbooks put together by agencies engaged in participatory planning--about the process. I remain quite confident that participatory planning is a topic that is notable enough to merit a wikipedia article, as it seems to be a well-used term throughout the inter-related spheres of urban planning and international community development. That being said, further research has somewhat complicated my understanding of participatory planning and how to approach this Wikipedia project. While my research continues to reveal that the term is broadly used in conversations about urban planning and community development, there is not a particularly well developed theoretical literature about Participatory Planning as such. While at first participatory planning seemed to be a very well-developed paradigm, my further research has revealed that it is far more loosely defined than I had thought. It seems to be a term used broadly to refer to a range of commitments in urban planning and community development, but not an especially specific and well-defined framework or idea. I am planning to speak with Professor Landemore about this issue as well. I think there is a broad enough body of work and research to justify the existence of this article, but writing an article about a very loose paradigm seems like a somewhat fraught process. My current plan is to focus on the broad, influential theoretical literature and history that has driven a broadly participatory turn in planning processes, guiding the loose paradigm of "participatory planning" along with more specifically defined paradigms such as advocacy and communicative planning, and then discuss the explicit methods that drive what practitioners do explicitly describe as participatory planning. However, I am a little wary about the lack of an explicit and organized secondary body of literature on the topic, and I don't want to overstep what a Wikipedia article should be. My fallback plan would be to refocus on a more narrowly defined but related planning paradigm, like collaborative planning. Much of the same research (and even writing) that I have been doing would be relevant to that article as well, but it would represent a serious pivot. I intend to make a more concrete plan with Professor Landemore on Monday.
Week 5 2/24-3/3--This blog post will cover the last two weeks of my Wikipedia adventure. I did not have very much to write about during the last week on its own, so I've decided to roll two weeks together into one more substantive post. I've spent the last two weeks starting my research process and narrowing my focus in on a specific article. At first my approach to picking an article was a little bit haphazard. I searched broadly through articles that were about different kinds and elements of democracy, looking for any stub or underdeveloped page I could find. I also, in an attempt to follow the approach that wiki edu suggested, looked through lists of articles, related articles sections, and wikiprojects. All of this turned up a few articles that seemed interesting and certainly needed work. The page on consensus democracy jumped out at me in particular, as it seemed like an interestingly bold idea, and we have not yet talked about it very much in class. That being said, I still felt broadly unenthusiastic about the project.
After a few days of tentatively trying to talk myself into the Consensus Democracy page, I decided to try a new approach. I went back to the set of interests that motivated me to take this class in the first place (something I all too often forget to do!). That set of interests is clustered around how democracy plays out at an organic community level, and how democratic control over small communities can be supported and institutionalized as a way to restore social fabrics that have long been drifting towards greater isolation. As such, I started to look around at democratic structures that work at the level of a local community in interesting and innovative ways. In that search I found the article for Participatory Planning, an urban planning and community development paradigm that involves a great deal of democratic control over how local communities are designed and structured. The article is very disorganized and underdeveloped, and so is clearly in need of some attention. It also aligns closely with my academic and career interests. Since deciding on my article I've been starting the research process by combing through the existing articles' bibliography, and assembling some new sources. I've found some really interesting theoretical literature, some of which dates as far back as the 70s, and I'm excited to start reading through it. For the next phase, I want to make a complete list of the current article's flaws, and start to look around for current participatory planning initiatives. I'm very excited about this project! TherealLiamplsc308 (talk) 01:30, 8 March 2021 (UTC)
Week 3 2/10-2/17--This is my very first experience working in Wikipedia, and so far it's been incredibly interesting. Though I had a little snafu making an account (I made one, forgot the password and was unable to recover it, and so had to make another), I am excited now to have a new account and get started! Since I haven't gotten into any substantive editing yet, I'm going to use this blog post to journal my first impressions.
I've used Wikipedia as a casual way to consume information for as long as I can remember. My interactions with the site range from the more formal practice of finding background information for school projects(I was always cautioned that it was unreliable, and I'm interested in how that relates to Wikipedias democratized nature), to the less formal meandering rabbit hotels that I sometimes find myself going down by following a chain of interesting links, to the entirely informal Wikipedia races that I would always have with friends in high school physics class (who can get from one page to another the fastest). I think the way Wikipedia's outward facing interface is structured is especially conducive to these kinds of fluid, informal, and even playful kinds of engagement. I'm interested in how this relates to Wikipedia as a democratic entity. So far, my impression of Wikipedia as an editor is a little more rigid than my experience as a user. Editing is a somewhat complicated process--more structured than I expected--and seems to require some degree of technical expertise. I'm curious to see if this remains true the more I get used to working with it, and if I see any ways in which the experience of editing Wikipedia resembles the kind of fluid, playful engagement that I'm familiar with as a user. I would like to track my experience editing Wikipedia with that spectrum in mind, and use it as an opportunity to reflect on how the kind of engagement that it fosters--whether it becomes more playful or whether it remains somewhat technical--affects my experience with it as a democratic space. It will certainly be interesting to see! TherealLiamplsc308 (talk) 01:53, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
Welcome!
editHello, TherealLiamplsc308, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.
I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing.
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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:54, 18 February 2021 (UTC)