I do find it puzzling though that undergrads think so uncritically about Wikipedia (I’ve heard this from many educators). After all, Wikipedia doesn’t present itself as a source of accurate information, it presents itself as: “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”

I think the problem is that Wikipedia comes from and describes a totally different universe than most educators come from and teach in… that is: *someone* must be teaching kids somewhere along the line: “if you read it in a book, or on the internet, or on wikipedia, it is true.” … when in fact kids should be learning: “if you read it in a book, or on the internet, or on wikipedia, it might be true, and you should verify it with another source before believing it to be true. Don’t trust everything you read.” Clearly, that’s not what they learn. And I suppose you can blame Wikipedia, but it seems to me there is a problem elsewhere. (Which doesn’t change the fact that kids read Wikipedia as the gospel… There is an easy way to solve that, though, surely: a zero on any paper that references Wikipedia without a second back-up source … no?)

Anyway, that’s my beef with our education system tho, and sort of beside the point.

Tools are good for the things they are good at; not so good for things they aren’t good at. So dismissing a hammer because it is not good at screwing screws misses the point. Though if what you really want is to screw a screw, then fair play: a hammer isn’t for you.

Wikipedia is a good first stop for an overview of general information on a topic, to be taken with a grain of salt, and follow-up with other sources. It’s not good as a catalog of Verified Fact.

Bite-Size Edits is a good way (we think) to make your sentences better, clearer, crisper … but it’s not a replacement for an editor, nor does it fix larger contextual or stylistic problems. It’s also, we think, a great way for writers/text to get seen by other writers/editors; and an entertaining & useful (to someone) way to spend 15 minutes of downtime.

I appreciate you taking the time to comment on my post about Bite-size Edits. I found it helpful to understand where the site has come from, and where it might be heading.

Maybe I’ve misread “game” when it’s been used to describe Bite-size Edits. If it simply means the site can be fun and addictive, I totally agree. I find my own editing work fun and addictive. But there’s something purposeful about describing the site as a game. The word “game” conjures up certain anticipations and feelings, which I’m not all to sure how to describe. But for me, “game” connotes “impracticality,” much like “work” connotes “practicality.”

In a way, I was disappointed you used wikipedia (or an essay about it) to illustrate how gameness can be practical. As an academic, I see wikipedia as a source of misinformation. And the nature of wikipedia as a social editing/crowd source site is the cause of the misinformation–or, often, disinformation, as Nicholson points out. But undergrads see wikipedia as a viable source of information. In horrifyingly large numbers, undergrads use the site as a source for studying or researching, unknowingly spreading spurious information.

Wikipedia is presented as a source of crowd sourced, accurate information. That wikipedia in fact does damage to the public’s access to accurate knowledge points to one of my underlying concerns about Bite-size Edits; will social editing provide what it purports, which is better writing. From the feedback Bite-size Edits has been getting, writers appear to find the suggestions they get back about their writing helpful and insightful. Well, who can argue with that. My only caveat remains that editing encompasses a wide range of editorial tasks, and writers and publishers would be remiss to ensure their writings to crowd sourced or social editing because these sources do not provide the full range of editorial skills needed to produce a quality publication.

But I wouldn’t go so far as to say no-one should use Bite-size Edits, and that a professional editor is the only viable source of editorial input. Rather, as I suggested in my post, Bite-size Edits provides a great source of readers, who make both great proofers and commentators. The site also holds other more interesting potentials: such as with Sachiko Murakami’s “The Idea Machine,” which takes the collaborative process to a ridiculous extreme.

I haven’t put up a piece to be edited on Bite-size Edits, and maybe I should, but I don’t see that as lessening the validity of my opinion. My comments are made as an editor, from the working-side of an editor. The editor’s process, as I experienced it, lacked the context of the text I felt necessary to usefully edit (aside from straightforward mechanical editing). That doesn’t mean I mightn’t be surprised by what I get back if I put a piece up on the site. So I’ll have to do just that…

Ryan

Thanks for the thoughtful comments.

Firstly, you are absolutely right that Bite-Size Edits suffers from some ambiguity: is it a proofreading tool, or is it a game? And if it is both, what does that mean exactly? The answer is: we shall find out.

But I take issue with your statement that a game must be impractical. Why can’t a game also be practical? In fact I think one of the most interesting areas of the web in the next few years will be harnessing human’s love of fun/games for useful purposes. For a beautiful essay on this topic, as it relates to Wikipeida, see Nicholson Baker’s “The Charms of Wikipedia:”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131

The gamishness of Bite-Size Edits did not come as an afterthought (that was always part of the idea: that it was fun), though certainly when we split Bite-Size from Book Oven we emphasized that aspect more. Why? Because when we looked at how people were using it in Book Oven, it became clear that gamish behaviours were already there: a certain addictiveness, and rich social connections between writers & editors, even though the texts were random. This was, I think, the most surprising part … that with these decontextualized sentences reader/editors become engaged with and attached to a text – if they like the writing. That was a kind of surprise.

So: we wanted to enhance those aspects of gamishness and fun, in order to drive more usage and engagement – all of which leads to the useful/practical output (we think) of better sentences.

So yes, Bite-Size Edits is ambiguous, but that’s part of what happens with an odd start-up like this. You have to react to how users start using the thing, and be open to let them take you in new directions.

It’s early days yet, lets see where it goes – hopefully you’ll keep playing around and giving us feedback. All this is supremely useful.

Finally, I think that you have not put any texts through the Bite-Size process? Am I right about that? If so, perhaps it is time to try it, and see what actually happens to your text. It’s hard to make a judgment about the utility of something that you haven’t even used yet!

The writers who have tried it report great surprise at how useful it is, not just for fixing errors, but more importantly, for making clear sentences that say what the writer means. So no, it is not good at rich, contextual editing; but it turns out to be very useful for taking a text and making it better. A professional editor might be a more direct route to get there – but I think that’s just the next step.

[Regarding Project Gutenberg texts ... the problem there is that to do a proper job in that context, we need to provide the scanned image of the text, as well as the text-to-be-edited. Otherwise "errors" that in fact are not errors tend to get corrected. We'd like to be able to do this... but that's a whole significant development job.]