User:Ragesoss/Lazy Virtues

Scholars in traditional disciplines have only just begun trying to make sense of Wikipedia from an academic perspective. As they do so, each knowledge community will take its own ideas, theories, and methods and map them onto Wikipedia. A long browse through the catalog of academic studies about Wikipedia reveals just how fragmentary those disciplinary approaches are. The first scholarly book devoted to Wikipedia, unfortunately but not surprisingly, follows the established pattern: it explores Wikipedia from one specialized disciplinary perspective but does little to improve our broader understanding of the project.

Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia, by composition professor Robert E. Cummings, has a great capsule summary. Wikipedia assignments provide writing teachers the rare opportunity to have their students write for a realistic audience, about things that matter to them. Students are traditionally given assignments to write for imaginary public audiences, but inevitably tailor their work for the actual audience of one: the teacher. With assignments based on improving Wikipedia articles, students have a real, large, diverse audience. And in the hacker idiom, "laziness" can be a virtue when students edit Wikipedia articles of their own choosing: it takes less work, yet produces better results, to write about topics one already knows about and cares about. Based on the classroom experiences of Cummings [and many other teachers who have led Wikipedia assignments] and on the literature of composition studies, there is good evidence that writing for realistic audiences lead to better writing, with more care given to style and mechanics and better "buy-in" on the part of students.

What might have been a useful book for de facto writing teachers across the humanities and social sciences, however, is derailed by Cummings' narrow disciplinary focus. Most of Lazy Virtues is spent discussing neither virtuous laziness nor Wikipedia writing assignments; instead, Cummings treats commons-based peer production (CBPP) more generally, from the perspective of rhetoric theory and composition studies.

Cummings explores new applications of writing and rhetoric theory through analogy, drawing on economic theory and particularly the work of Yochai Benkler. Benkler, in his famous paper "Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm", describes three types of economic production: the "market model", where an individual interacts directly with the market, choosing what to produce based on price signals; the "firm model", where a firm decides what to produce and directs the work of the individuals it employs; and a new kind of production&mdash;exemplified by Linux and other open-source software projects and by collaborative knowledge projects like Wikipedia&mdash;that Benkler describes as "commons-based peer production", in which individuals evaluate for themselves what they might contribute to a common project, based on both the needs of the project and their own aptitudes and inclinations.

Cummings sees the traditional writing classroom as analogous to the firm model. Teachers take on the role of intended audience, in effect defining for students what the "market" (audience) wants. Writing directly for peer audiences in a collaborative environment like Wikipedia, Cummings argues, is more like the CBPP model. He proceeds to stretch the economic theory–rhetoric theory connection much further than it ought to go: the concepts of commodity and commodification, transaction cost, and modularization all find counterparts in rhetoric. Cummings even suggests that a theoretical understanding of rhetoric will be crucial as an information economy becomes dominant over the production of traditional physical goods, and that (per the arguments of rhetoric scholar Richard Lanham), we might even "anticipate a revival of arts and letters based on its value of capturing the audience's attention" (p. 40).

The book might seem attractive to Wikipedians looking for a deeper understanding of collaborative writing. But the application of rhetoric theory to Wikipedia and similar collaborative projects often obscures more than it reveals. For example, in discussing Marx's concept of commodity fetishism as applied to online rhetoric, Cummings writes that "it is possible to consider wikis as tools of information commodification, acting as information decontextualizing machines&mdash;grinding thoughts into atomic particles [...] devoid of authorial and content context" (pp. 45-46). That seems an odd way of looking at wikis. Wikis' key features are complete edits histories&mdash;which provide levels of chronological and intratextual authorial context that are inconceivable in collaboratively written print works&mdash;and ubiquitous hyperlinks&mdash;which create unlimited potential for content context.

There are occasional hints of provocative insights that rhetoric theory might bring to bear on Wikipedia, but Cummings sticks too close to Benkler's work and the canonical examples of CBPP to explore the rhetorical differences between different online community-based projects. In discussing Linux and forking, Cummings notes in passing that "epistemic rhetoric teaches us that a stable consensus within large discourse communities is simply impossible" (p. 142). This bears discussion, given the central role that consensus plays in Wikipedia, and the difference between the working definition of consensus and the idealization articulated by the official Consensus policy. While forking is relatively frequent in open-source software communities, forks have been a relatively minor issues and in the far larger community of Wikipedia; content forks are generally suppressed, and project forks (such as Conservapedia and Citizendium) have not drawn away significant portions of the community. In some respects, at least, Wikipedia seems to demonstrate just the kind of consensus that ought not be possible. Unfortunately, Cummings does not even provide a reference to follow up on the lesson of impossible consensus that epistemic rhetoric has supposedly taught us.

The one marginally redeeming aspect of Lazy Virtues is the accounts of Cummings' own Wikipedia assignments, which he used in first-year college composition courses in 2005. The assignments themselves are designed specifically for composition courses, and thus will be of little use to those who teach writing in other contexts, and Wikipedia has changed so much since 2005 that even repeating the assignments for the same type of course might prove difficult. But even if they do little to improve our understanding of Wikipedia and its potential as a teaching tool, I found Cummings' case studies of specific students and their performance in and reactions to Wikipedia assignments to be intrinsically interesting.