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Based on a study of observable changes author-users made to three Wikipedia articles, this article contends that Wikipedia supports notions of revision, collaboration, and authority that writing studies purports to value, while also extending our understanding of the production of knowledge in public spaces. It argues that Wikipedia asks us to reexamine our expectations for the stability of research materials and who should participate in public knowledge making.
Often a top result on Google searches, Wikipedia, the free online wiki1 "encyclopedia," is increasingly cited by students in academic papers. This usage, together with its position as the most well-known wiki, has led Wikipedia to be the focus of much conversation about what happens when visitors can not only respond to but also revise and edit a public online space labeled as disseminating knowledge. Discussion of Wikipedia is widespread in the popular media. Popular press coverage of Wikipedia has been consistently prevalent-indeed, somewhat astounding-in the last several years (e.g., Ahrens; Giles; Hafner; Hof; Jaschik; McLemee; Noguchi; Pink; Poe; Seigenthaler; Stone; Sydell; Weiss). Rarely a month goes by without another new article on Wikipedia.
Despite its frequent use and extensive media coverage, scholarship in writing studies has yet to offer in-depth study of the writing and researching practices of Wikipedia. To date, no study of Wikipedia appears in the major journals of the discipline. Computers and composition scholars have done important work on wiki technology, some of which mentions and/or cites Wikipedia (e.g., Barton; Cummings and Barton ; Godwin-Jones; Palmquist; Reilly and Williams; Samuels), but this work does not examine the writing that happens in Wikipedia and, as a result, has not mined wikis' potentials for putting into practice and extending writing studies' ideas about production, collaboration, authorship, and revision. Studies of Wikipedia are being published outside of writing studies (e.g., Ciffolilli), but as Wikipedia is writing technology I believe it is important to explore this resource in our own scholarship. Wikipedia can be a valuable composition tool-one of a host of online technologies (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us) that allows for public knowledge making-but it is sometimes misunderstood, misused, or dismissed. Through a study of observable changes author-users2 made to three articles in Wikipedia, this article explores the notions of composing, authorship, and research afforded by...