Outline also extended to Friday (11-9)

Originally due this Tuesday, the outline should be posted to your blog by Friday–and again, early is fine.

In case it isn’t obvious, these two assignments (this and the annotated bibliography) have two purposes. The first is to give me an opportunity to steer you away from bad choices, if there are any. The second is to get your thinking about argument and structure from an early stage.

An Example

The following is an outline from a paper I just completed with a colleague:

Introduction

1. Much of the popular coverage of Wikipedia recently has focussed on its accuracy.

2. Another good approach would be to look at what areas of the knowledge domain Wikipedia covers.

The Bias of Wikipedia

1. Many of the recent problems with Wikipedia have been with inaccurate or defamatory articles.

2. Equally or more important is whether Wikipedia biases its coverage in favor of topics that are not traditionally as important to scholarly encyclopedias: Steven Colbert or the Lord of the Rings, for example.

3. To map that coverage, we argue that two metrics are useful: an overall taxonomy of subject coverage, and a mapping between traditional subject-specific encyclopedias and Wikipedia.

4. These two measures tell us that Wikipedia is particularly strong in some of the “hard” sciences, but does not cover the humanities and social sciences nearly as well.

A Topical Measure

1. Size is not the only thing that matters when it comes to academic libraries or encyclopedias; coverage also matters.

2. Classification systems like the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress Classification can be used to compare the distribution of topics between libraries, or o between libraries and a standard like Books in Print.

3. We took a sample of articles from Wikipedia and coded them into LC classification.

4. The distribution can then be compared to Books in Print (see the figure), a useful metric of general knowledge.

5. Wikipedia tends to have more articles on the naval sciences and military than in other published works, due to an anomaly in naming conventions in encyclopedias.

6. The bias is even more pronounced in history categories because Wikipedia imported data from another source that was heavily history related.

7. The bias in favor of music is not due to an emphasis on humanities, but rather the result of strong fan-based communities of popular musical groups.

8. The sciences are well covered, but the social sciences are not–no surprise, though there are surprises (medicine and law) within.

Another measure of emphasis

1. The distribution of headwords alone is not enough, we should also look at the average length of articles and how frequently they are edited.

2. The articles are not uniform in length. (See figure for distribution by LC category, of the average size of articles.)

3. The longest articles are in areas that we noted seemed to have fewer articles in total: law and medicine, for example.

4. Likewise, some of the most frequently changed articles seem to be in the humanities, reflecting the enthusiasms of the fan culture.

5. Overall, Wikipedia coverage is, to borrow a term from a New Yorker overview, “lumpy.”

Wikipedia and Other Encyclopedias

1. How does the coverage of Wikipedia differ from that of traditional field-specific encyclopedias?

2. The best way to find out is to compare articles in Wikipedia to those in encyclopedias of physics, linguistics, and poetry.

3. The most effective way to do this is to compare on the basis of article titles (headwords), though this raises problems.

4. Google provides a good way to match headwords as nearly as possible.

5. We used human coders, with a five-point comparison process, which reduces coding bias.

6. This process can lead, however, to some false positives.

7. It is important to map not only from the traditional encyclopedias to Wikipedia (to show deficiencies in the latter) but back the other way too.

8. A substantial minority of articles in the traditional encyclopedias were missing from Wikipedia.

9. This suggests that there remain under-developed areas of Wikipedia, even as more popular areas are far more extensive than printed-and-bound encyclopedias.

10. While it’s difficult to arrive at a topically-constrained view of a particular field in Wikipedia, we did manage to provide a view backwards, and found many articles in Wikipedia that were not included in printed encyclopedias.

Whence Differences?

1. Some of the Wikipedia directly references the outside encyclopedic references.

2. It seems poetry is undercovered, perhaps because poets are less interested in the encyclopedic process, or particularly Wikipedia.

3. Some of this is due to differences in editorial choice: e.g., should an encyclopedia include biographical articles?

4. This is less of a problem for Wikipedia, since its content tends to be searched rather than browsed.

5. There may also be an issue of how broad or narrow a given article should be.

6. The poetry encyclopedias had the greatest differences between Wikipedia and the printed encyclopedia, and points to ways in which Wikipedia might differ from traditional encyclopedias.

Conclusion

1. The printed encyclopedia is bound by traditional limits of space and weight, and this shapes its content.

2. The process by which Wikipedia is created fundamentally affects its content bias.

3. Overall, whether you think Wikipedia is accurate or not probably depends on whether you are a physicist or a poet.

4. It’s probably not a coincidence that two areas of particular lack–medicine and law–are also areas in which there is a particular licensing of expertise.

5. Can you have too much of a good thing? Does an encyclopedia need an article on Finnish profanity?

6. At present, Wikipedia has several projects aimed at making particular topics more complete and authoritative.

7. Printed works provide a good gauge of coverage, but should not be taken as a kind of “gold standard.”

8. The approaches taken here provide two ways of measuring divergence of Wikipedia from other collections of knowledge, and tracking its relationship to the wider range of knowledge.

Format

Some folks ran into formatting difficulties in posting your annotated bibliography to the blog. I want to encourage you to do two things. First, write it in a plain-text editor (e.g., Notepad on Windows machines), and do any markup (bold, etc.) in the editing box of the blog. Alternatively, instead of pasting from word into the “visual” tab of the blog composing page, if you paste into the “code” tab, all of your markup in Word will disappear. I suspect that 99% of the problems with formatting is because of a reliance on Microsoft Word.

You are welcome to use the traditional I, 1, A, i, a (or whatever) multi-level outline, but to be honest, I am perfectly happy with subheadings, followed by a series of thesis statements for each paragraph in that subheading. That is what I have done above. This should provide a clear structure not just of a single paper, but of five (or seven, or nine, etc.) little papers that make up the big paper.

Sentences, not topics, at the paragraph level

At least at the flattest level, your outline should make claims, that would then be argued and defended in that paragraph. Topical statements (statements about the subject or focus of a section) are find at the broadest level, but at the narrowest level–which should be the paragraph level–I want a statement that can be argued. There should be something that can be defended or refuted; not “Now we will discuss cheese,” but rather “Cheese is tasty.” The first of these is a topical sentence, the second is an argument that needs to be defended. You don’t have to show what evidence you plan to use to defend these claims–you just need to make them.

Can I deviate from the outline in the final document?

Of course, an outline is not written in stone: it is just written. I expect that your final document will grow (and potentially shrink) from this outline in various directions. In fact, the final article that was created based on the outline above is structured only vaguely like what appears here. However, I want to see this as a kind of skeletal first draft that allows for a strongly structured final project. If you cannot make a structured argument at this stage, you are not ready to start writing.

Questions? Comment below or over on Facebook.