Dissertation Abstract
From CannedWiki
A Hypersocial-Interactive Model of Wiki Writing: Collaboration, Conversation, and Composition in an Online Fan Community of Writers
The effects of digital technologies and their associated social practices on self-sponsored collaborative writing have largely remained unexamined in writing studies. My dissertation examines how notions of collaborative writing, which have largely developed around the circumstances of face-to-face synchronous talk that retain allegiance to individual textual ownership, are challenged by new media such as the wiki. This study draws from three years of observation and data collection I conducted on one of the largest, if not the largest, fan wikis in the world, WoWWiki.com, a Wikipedia-like website with more than 75,000 articles voluntarily written by fans of Warcraft. In writing studies, what WoWWiki helps us understand are the new conditions for literacy arising from the emergence of new and social media on the internet. First, the wiki allows for collaboration that is often asynchronous and much more mediated and distributed than that in face-to-face writing groups—even as it continues to be carried out through talk in print form. Second, we are in an especially lively (and transitional) period because the social web has made possible the emergence of collaborative practices and technologies that are entering a society where the idea of the single author has been strong. Finally, the wiki extends our theories of writer-reader interactions previously developed around print and, later, hypertext because the wiki affords what neither print nor hypertext can: the near-effortless ability of readers to become literal co-authors of a text. In addition, by working over the internet writers and readers from various locations around the world can easily deal directly with one another in literate exchanges. Wikis afford a large-scale and radical collapse of writer-reader relations. These are the new conditions for literacy, undergirding what I call hypersocial-interactive writing. With these new conditions as a starting point, I ask: how does this transitional period materialize in the collaborative talk among WoWWikians and affect attempts at collaboration?
I first analyze biographical articles on Warcraft characters to identify general patterns of collaboration. These results reveal for what purposes WoWWikians use talk pages, and I found a preponderance of context-focused talk across two general areas of attention—the writing and the group. More than two-thirds of the time WoWWikians focus on the writing of articles (most often debating facts and theories about Warcraft lore). Just under one-third of the time they focus on the group’s activities (typically, the playing of the video game World of Warcraft or offering theories as to what content might be a part of the next expansion pack for the game). These findings suggest that for the most part contributors use the space of the talk page to improve articles. Further, the study sample revealed a near absence of talk about writing form (e.g. organization) and process (e.g., talk about who could, would, or should edit articles)—accounting for less than 1% and 1.3% of all talk, respectively. What my research demonstrates is that talk affecting character articles is actually distributed across a number of spaces on the site and that this collaborative talk includes participants who are not the immediate contributors to a particular article. For example, form-focused talk can be found in various stand-alone policy and guideline articles such as “The Manual of Style” which serve to standardize all articles. This configuration of self-sponsored collaborative writing appears unique to wikis.
I also explain how textual ownership is managed in this context. The collaborative writing on WoWWiki indicates a significant departure from how textual ownership works in effective face-to-face writing groups or even other social media such as blogs, where individuals most often write individual posts that are not editable by readers. Readers of a wiki article can, at will, become co-authors of the text. Therefore, the “habits of mind” (Spigelman, 1998) of individual writers on WoWWiki are significant factors in determining authors’ attitudes towards collaboration and thus how writing gets done. Whereas the practice of individuals in effective writing groups is to temporarily give up control of their texts to the group (i.e., their peers), authors on WoWWiki must immediately and always relinquish control to the group. What my results show is that the vast majority of contributors in the study sample collaborate effectively as they debate facts and theories regarding what is, should be, and could be in articles. In this context, however, any claims of textual ownership disrupt collaboration. Ultimately, this wiki-mediated form of collaborative writing requires contributors to share a more communal notion of authorship and textual ownership, and this represents a significant shift from how authorship is thought of in most other contexts. Indeed, where we see collaboration break down and the project suffer, contributors in fact use the prevailing discourse of individual authorship.
Finally, these data concerning patterns of collaboration on WoWWiki extend theories of texts as sites of writer-reader interactions. Indeed, I argue that what the wiki ultimately affords is an extraordinary collapse of writer-reader relations. With regards to both print and hypertext, our field, of course, has largely settled debates regarding whether writing and reading are social acts and to what degree readers are participants in meaning-making. However, wikis expand this participatory power of readers. For example, with hypertext, readers can choose a limited number of forks in the road, but with wikis readers can literally become co-authors by revising the original text, and further writers and readers interact with one another on talk pages to discuss these texts in ways not possible with traditional print or even hypertext. Audience is no longer simply a construct or relegated to more open ways of reading. Readers become readers-as-writers. Writing becomes a hypersocial activity.
Beyond contributing to the field’s increasingly comprehensive depiction of talk around writing, this exploration of the new conditions of literacy holds particular significance to those interested in the pervasiveness of networked technology in daily life and its effects on authorship, intellectual property, and audience. By thoroughly considering how collaborative practices and the technologies that support them emerge out of the social web, my dissertation illustrates how collective social practices are technologically inflected on WoWWiki. Further, new media such as the wiki are blurring the lines between what it means to be a writer or reader. In order to understand the consequences of this transitional time, we must understand what it means to read and write together.
(Revised Sept. 2009)
