"(Critical) Discourse Analysis" on Wikipedia

[Rosemarie Coste Yechiel]

To answer the key question:
 
So, WHO IS WRITING THIS NONSENSE?
 
Anyone. 
 
The design of a Wiki (the Wikipedia being the best-known example) supports
the practice that all readers can be writers: if you read an article that
strikes you as incomplete or incorrect or otherwise not serving its purpose,
fix it. There's no authority to process a suggestion or a complaint; no
publisher to accept or reject your credentials; no editor to ensure that
what you have done is consistent with what other writers have done. If you
are a reader, you can be a writer; if you don't like an article, you can
change it so that you do like it; later, if another reader thinks of
something else to add or enhance about the article, that reader has just as
much right as you do to change the article. 
 
Who is writing this nonsense? You, if you'd like. If not, the nonsense is
written by anyone else who does like to write it. 
 
The goal of a Wiki is to make it easy for everyone to pool knowledge; if we
all help, contributing our best knowledge about Subject X, we can know much
more than if we all work alone. 
Of course, one huge impediment toward meeting this goal is the reality that
most of the people who know the most about any Subject X are too busy
working with it directly to spend time adding their knowledge to the
Wikipedia; articles are more likely to be written by the biggest fan of
Subject X, someone who cares a great deal about it and wishes everyone else
did, than by the leading expert on Subject X. That's the current situation;
it doesn't have to be the permanent situation. 
 
There are four tabs across the top of every Wikipedia page (except a very
few for basic administrative matters):

Click article to read the text itself.
Click discussion to read what people have said about the text, or to say
something about it yourself.
Click edit this page to change the text (which includes adding links, the
best thing to do if detailed information is available elsewhere)
Click history to see a log of changes to the text.

It's easy to change Wikipedia articles; for anyone who'd like to experiment
with the process, my suggestion is to go make some changes rather than
wishing somebody else would.
 
rose coste
 <mailto:rcoste at tamu.edu> rcoste at tamu.edu
http://www.scribionics.com/CV/coste.htm 
 
 
 

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