Accessibility can only prove successful with a common goal
When delving into the group edit assignment; I began to think about the credentials one needed to post an edit in the classes assignment. We have to log into a Baruch blogs account and be added to the sites user list. Now imagine if everyone on the Internet had access to our document. We would ideally like to think that these users interested in our assignment would provide us with helpful definitions and direction to our goal, but it’s naive to think that many people would not simply try to sabotage our assignment for a quick laugh at our expense.
A website like wikipedia requires less credentials than our Baruch blog to begin making changes on the site. All that is needed is an accessible email account; that’s it. The reason why a site like this can become and remain a source of quality and consistent information, is the utopian idea of a group working together for a common goal. Wikipedia has a large userbase that is committed to providing the Internet with a reliable open source enclyopedia. So in order to be successful in working on something that can be touched and accessed by so many people without checking credentials; is to have both a moderating staff and a dedicated group of users who are all working toward a similar goal.
In this case our class is looking to provide concise and correct definitions for our assignment. That is our common goal that we are working towards. Without a framework being provided for our assignment, I’m not sure how concise or correct we would be able to make a list of important key terms based on our reading.
Actually, the barrier to entry for Wiipedia editing is even lower than a verifiable email address. In most cases, changes are allowed when you aren’t logged in. Your IP address is recorded, but users are otherwise anonymous if they contribute without logging in.
Thanks for this, Cary, and for your interventions into the document. You’re absolutely right that a certain oversite structures and a shared set of values are necessary for an enterprise like Wikipedia (or our smaller experiment) to be successful. Hopefully Rozensweig’s piece that we read for today’s class gave you a fuller sense of those values and the structure that governs Wikipedia.
The goal of this assignment is to get the class to collaboratively build out a set of ideas that we’ll refer back to over the course of the semester. These are complicated, shifting notions, but having a sense of how they relate to the work of digital history will help us better assess and eventually build projects.