| In 1995, the first wiki website, Ward Cunningham's Wiki WikiWeb, went public for the use of a community of computer programmers, and few outside of that community and those working in similar fields would have imagined wiki technology, a technology that allows visitors to a wiki-based web site to modify its structure and content. Fifteen years later, however, wiki comes to compositionists an already-loaded term. The mainstream media depicts wiki as a challenge to the ways we think about who writes and disseminates information, the nature of information itself, and who reads and how they read and use that information. At the same time, scholarship in the field of composition studies claims wiki as a writing tool that evidences and provides the process-centered, collaborative, democratized space for which researchers and teachers of writing have been looking. In both cases, the literature constructs ideas about what it means to be a writer and a reader in relation to wiki so that compositionists encounter wiki technology as always already described and defined. I analyze these oppositional perspectives on wiki technology and make it possible to move through, before, and beyond these constructions of readers and writers and the intellectual traditions through which they are made possible to make space for other readings of wiki technology and answer the following questions: How are the traditional roles of reader and writer articulated or challenged in the discourse surrounding wiki technology? How are the roles of readers and writers made possible through applications of wiki technology? I analyze the discourse surrounding wiki technology and then the writer and reader functions made possible in three wiki applications: Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, and Citizendium. It is the argument of this project that wiki makes visible and explicit the ways in which readers and writers have always already interacted, or at least desired to interact, providing a deeper and different understanding of the roles assumed by and constructed for readers and writers, an understanding that is situated within, without, and in the margins of the traditions that have always already constructed them (and wiki technology) differently. |
