Stuart Geiger and I presented a paper about Wikipedia literacy in Linz, Austria for WikiSym 2012 (link below). It’s in the short paper series in which we introduce the concept of of “trace literacy”, a multi-faceted theory of literacy that sheds light on what new knowledges and organizational forms are required to improve participation in Wikipedia’s communities. The paper focuses on three short case studies about the misunderstandings resulting from article deletions in the past year and relate them to three key problems that literacy practitioner and scholar, Richard Darville outlined in his English literacy research. Two of the case studies are from interviews that we did with Kenyan Wikipedians, and the other concerns the Haymarket affair article controversy. Literacy, we believe, has a lot more to do with users being able to understand the complex traces left by experienced editors and how, where and when to argue their case, than simply learning how MediaWiki syntax works. Find the paper at: http://www.wikisym.org/ws2012/bin/download/Main/Program/p21wikisym2012.pdf

1. “Writing up rather than writing down”
Becoming Wikipedia literate “W r
H. Ford & S. Geiger
WikiSym 2012

2. Literacy scholarship
Two main approaches (from Street 1993):
•Educators and psychologists take a skills-
based approach and focus on elements of
reading and writing
•Anthropologists & sociolinguists focus on
social and cultural aspects of reading and
writing and the rich cultural variations of
these practices
Street, B., ed. Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. 1993.

3. Studying “literacy” and
Wikipedia
Two main approaches have dominated:
•Reader-focused: responsible use of Wikipedia
as a resource, similar to “media literacy” for
the news
•General purpose: “Web literacy” seeks a
common set of core competencies required
by digital learners everywhere.

4. Studying “literacy” and
Wikipedia
We instead focus on organizational literacy, the
“background knowledges” (Darville 1989)
needed to be an empowered, literate member
of a community like Wikipedia.
Organizational literacies are often highly local,
situated, contextual, and tacit.
Darville, R. The Language of Experience and the Literacy of Power. In M. Taylor and
J. Draper, eds., Adult Literacy Perspectives. Culture Concepts, Toronto, 1989.

5. Trace literacy
Wikipedians extensively use trace data – revision
histories, edit summaries, templates, warnings,
tags, logs, archives – to interact and coordinate
tasks.
Editors come to know each other not only
through interpersonal communication, but also
highly-complex modes of tracing.

6. New Wikipedians don’t always know that:
•Talk pages, edit summaries, and process pages are used to
perform different kinds of specific tasks
•Templates like {{hangon}}, {{stub}} and {{helpme}} have
special meanings in Wikipedia’s bureaucracies
•References serve to establish notability of article topics in
addition to verifying individual claims in the article
•Edit histories, user talk messages, and usernames are public,
and Wikipedians routinely surveil each other
•Not all users are human, but there are ways of determining
who is and who is not a bot

7. Method
• Grounded accounts of actual practice in different
socio-cultural contexts in order to understand
the central role of power relations in literacy
practice.
• Focusing on “what went wrong” in order to
work out where the system needs to be
exposed/made transparent.
• 3 case studies of deletions in Kenya and the US.

8. Misreadings,
misunderstandings
1.“Misreading organizational texts”
2.“Agentless accounts”
3.“Writing up rather than writing down”
• Richard Darville

9. 1. Misreading
organizational texts
• “Misreading is not about being unable to
get words off the page, but rather being
unable to participate effectively in the social
action and relations that are carried in texts
and documents - or even to see what that
action and those relations are.” Darville

10. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/130704/

11. 2. “Agentless accounts”
• “When the agents of actions are deleted
from texts, readers must “fill them in,” using
a background knowledge of how actions are
done and who would do them.” Darville

12. • Kipsizoo “... we opted to try to create it in
Swahili rather. Cause the guys are so harsh
(on English WP)... We clearly indicated that
these are just stub articles. I think it was a bot
or something. It wasn’t a real guy... maybe.”
• (Interview, Nairobi, Kenya, 4 August, 2011)

13. 3. “Writing up rather
than writing down”
• “What counts is how matters can be
written up (to enter them into the
organizational process), not how they can
be written down (to relate experience or
aid memory)”. Darville

15. In conclusion
• literacy is a way of exercising power in
Wikipedia;
• debates surrounding these deletions are often
about who was right and who was wrong,
without an understanding of what was being
misunderstood, what was being misread;
• further work on particular types of
“background knowledges” for different social,
economic, cultural contexts are required to
design more transparent systems.

16. The risk?
Claims that Wikipedians are merely
opposed to the perspectives of those
dissimilar from them (whether that is that
they are from Africa or the academy) is
not helping the encyclopedia grow in
areas that it is currently weak.