Learning to Read Wikipedia

I am fascinated by Wikipedia. I can happily spend hours there surfing definitions, following links and making citations.

I am also studying myself as a reader.

Surfing, linking, citing: three literacy practices which are changing the nature of reading and how we make meaning with text.

Wikipedias are places where many people are working together to make encyclopedias in many languages. They produce a collaborative and amorphous public text. It can, in theory, be added to or amended by anyone, with editorial control held (again, in theory) by a group of interested people rather than an academic authority.

Wikipedia raises tantalising questions about knowledge construction, learning and the nature of 'expertise'. 'Knowledge' is no longer the statement of an academic authority. It exists in the public commons, rather than the academic common room. Encyclopedic knowledge grows; it is not stated or given.

Wikipedia began, like much else on the Internet, in English. But it has become a multilingual enterprise, with wikis proliferating in many other languages. This is not just a matter of translation. It is also the production - the remediation - of meaning in diverse contexts. So definitions move like citations, through languages as well as social contexts.

In my work studying children researching for school projects, I notice how much Wikipedia has become the information source of choice. It often springs to the top in search engines. But it also accommodates children through the inclusion of a 'simple English' version.

My daughter, aged nine, first introduced me to Wikipedia Simple English. She found it on her own. In searching using key words such as 'pyramids' for school projects she was encountering the biggest problem of the web as an information source - excess and overload. But also the web sites she found were often written in complicated and impenetrable language. She was finding it hard to get a 'way in' as a reader.

She had lots of pictures of pyramids, but found most written text about them hard-going. She also found that web sites often recycle the same piece of text - probably scanned originally from a print encyclopedia - and the piece of text is usually not aimed at a nine-year-old.

When she searched 'pyramids simple English' she found that Wikipedia had anticipated her needs.

So instead of this:

A pyramid is any man-made structure where the upper surfaces are triangular and converge on one point. The base of a pyramid may be either quadrilateral or trilateral, meaning that a pyramid may have either three or four vertical sides, but all pyramids must have trilateral sides. The measurements of these triangles uniformly classify the shape as isosceles and sometimes equilateral.

She read this:

A pyramid is a shape. It typically has a square bottom with four triangular sides that get narrower as they approach the point at the top, called the "apex". A pyramid that has a triangle as its base instead of a square is called a tetrahedron.

Wikipedia, perhaps more than any other source, allows us to see the many voices of knowledge-making at work. Knowledge is always contested through language choices but this fact has been concealed by the monologic authority of the text book and the print encyclopedia.

So what is a pyramid?

The first extract above typifies many aspects of 'academic writing' - in sentence structures and subordinations, in vocabulary, in the mix of modalities - concessions, contrasts, insistences ('may be...but...must...') - that make for careful prose definitions. Maybe this care is a sign of a collaboratively produced text.

But what about the 'simple' version? Is the 'simple English' definition a translation of the academic into the vernacular? Not really. It remediates the whole idea of a pyramid by calling it a 'shape' (this word not used in the first definition) instead of a 'man-made structure'.

Is the 'simple' wiki version simply a matter of easy reading? Or does it signal another way of knowing pyramids? If a pyramid is 'a shape' can it not also exist in nature? Does it have to be 'man-made'?

The Simple English Wikipedia looks like a very useful research tool for information literacy - but also for critical literacy too. Knowledge is visibly contested - or debated, or re-configured - even when a principle of 'translation' is applied. The shift to another verbal context does not mean that we are still talking about the 'same thing'. The simple English wiki involves acts of citation, but also invention.

It is interesting that 'information' in wikipedia is no longer a literal storage and provision of facts, of truth, as in the tradition of encyclopedic knowledge from Diderot. It is more of a dialogue of
versions. Multiple contexts of knowledge-making are built in to the same site. Critical interpretation becomes a necessity in the act of reading.

When I read Wikipedia I am not just taking meaning off the shelf of authority. I am also questioning it. Is this piece of information true? Is it complete? Is it clear? Can the wording be improved? Is there anything I can add? Text becomes susceptible to transformation as part of the practice of reading. As I read, I also 'write'.


Learning to read and write in the information age is about being able to participate in these dialogues.