Wiki Reflections

Over the course of the past eight weeks, our class has been collaborating on a LitWiki page for Technical Writing in the Digital Age.

My contributions to the page were a fairly balanced mix of new content and copyediting. I found the pedagogical approaches to technical/digital writing really fascinating, and it was interesting learning about some of the theories in order to condense them down into a digestible wiki section. In fact, condensing large swaths of text into smaller, more concise pieces is probably the most useful skill I picked up through this process. I sometimes tend towards wordiness myself, so it was great practice to recognize and remedy superfluous information and convoluted language. I now find it easier to look at my own writing in a more objective way and pare it down where needed. I think my most valuable contribution was restructuring the outline of sections and subsections. Scannability is huge for digital writing, and I felt that the thirteen-ish major sections looked very cluttered to the eye and made it difficult to find specific information. Merging like topics into one section felt like a big sigh of relief.

This was my second experience with in-depth wiki editing, having taken a class with Dr. Lucas in undergrad where we did a similar project. I really enjoyed it back then, but did not keep up the practice after graduation. Now, working with the class wiki, I'm rediscovering the satisfaction of contributing to a massive knowledge database. Wikis in general are valuable to any field of study, but especially to technical and digital writing. Honing your skills in one area will help your skills in the other since their goals are very similar. Additionally, a free, well-researched, and well-cited resource for Technical Writing in the Digital Age ensures that future netizens will have accurate and reliable information, should they be seeking to learn about it. Not only is the page itself useful as a resource, it also links to many other sources for their perusal.

Overall, I am pleased with how our class wiki came out. The resulting page looks clean, organized, and helpful. I like that it even delves into topics we never discussed in class, such as the history of technical writing and the advent of artificial intelligence. And since this is a living, digital document, I can only assume it will continue to build and grow from here.