Wikipedia Reflection

Porter's piece on intertextuality can be applied to the wikipedia process and website, and the idea of intertextuality is critical for online encyclopedias to exist. The construct Porter describes, intertextuality, or the idea that all text is borrowed from previous writer's work, is crucial in creating an online encyclopedia that uses hyperlinks, and needs credible, well cited information. When one is researching a wikipedia article to develop they most often turn to other books on the topic that have already been published. By doing so, one could say that any edits made to a wikipedia page using information from another source could be called plagiarism. If one simply copies and pastes information to a wikipedia page, that can be labeled plagiarism, but this can be avoided by understanding the text you are citing and re-wording the information in a useful way so that it applies to the wikipedia page you are trying to expand on.  Wikipedia could not exist if this construct had not been broken down in the last few years of our writing career. Porter comments on how the opening portion of The Declaration of Independence was taken fromt he ideas of another author, and we do not consider this great piece of American literature to be plagiarism. These ideas on intertextuality are archaic, and in the extremely interconnected world we live in today we thrive off of intertextuality and the "borrowing" of ideas to create our own new social trends and ideas. Porter's idea of a discourse community is also very prevalent in the wikipedia community as well. The idea of a wiki being a collective effort of many sources creates a community of people who are similarly interested in a topic. This is exactly what Porter calls a discourse community. You can bet that anything you put on that community's favorite wikipedia is going to be highly scrutinized and edited for error, due to the involvement of a highly interested discourse community. The definition Porter gives us in Writing about Writing is a perfect definition of wikipedia. He states "A "discourse community" is a group of individuals bound by a common interest who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is regulated." Wikipedia provides that regulation for the discourse community by setting out a list of guidelines for editing. These guidelines state that when editing a wiki you must be objective and non-biased and also that you write in an encyclopedic style. Although there is no main moderator for the entire online encyclopedia the discourse community of that page will quickly notice any bias and remove your edit. Wikipedia is interesting, because the discourse community is the one doing the regulation of their own articles. For my wikipedia edit, I created a new page on a very niche style of music. Although the entire world can now access this article, I am willing to bet not many people will, and therefore a very small discourse community is present. Although there is no discourse community on wikipedia (yet), there is a very large community of people posting about Seapunk on the popular blogging website Tumblr. Although tumblr is not an encyclopedic website, it could be a good place to go to get some conversation going on the wikipedia page, since there are other people interested in this very niche style of music. The main focus of this piece is that wikipedia is a great place to get scholarly conversation started on any article you have an interest in, no matter how obscure. Purdy presents the notion that wikipedia is based on revision and idea development. This makes writing on Wikipedia much less intimidating or daunting of a task, since you are writing for the entire online community to see. Purdy also mentions how wikipedia's development is based on conversation. This creates a very positive and forward thinking attitude towards the development of a scholarly article on a collective website like wikipedia. By taking the focus off of credibility and putting the emphasis on the access to reliable sources and factual information wikipedia has enabled anyone with access to a library to contribute to a scholarly article. There are many features of Wikipedia that make it very easy to see what other people wrote about the topic, or what people are saying about the topic. The History page shows previous edits to that specific wikipedia article, and the discussion page lets people comment on the topic in a forum like setting. These tools make wikipedia feel more like a community than just a website for information. These aspects of wikipedia and the revision of wikipedia articles all represent intertextuality in the modern technological era.