Wikipedia, the People Formerly Known as the Audience, and First-Year Writing

> Michael Kuhne and Gill Creel

Writing in and about Wikipedia encourages students to think about the outcomes of their writing and, by extension, changes the student/teacher relationship in pedagogically useful ways.

n 2006, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosens blog post The People Formerly Known as the Audience went viral in the journalism community. In the post Rosen argues that a fundamental power shift has occurred between Big Media and the people formerly known as the audience (PFKATA), who were not only writing back, but also writing on their own and broadcasting voice and video as well. Yes, the strategic centers of corporate media power still exist, but, Rosen argues, the rise of the read/write web (a more descriptive phrase for Web 2.0) means Big Medias understanding of their audience has to change accordingly. Rosen has personal experience with the read/write web and large media projects: among his other accomplishments, he is a former member of the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia. This connection between Rosens brief manifesto and his service to Wikipedia is not accidental; quite the contrary, it makes perfect sense because Wikipedia is one of the most well-known sites where the PFKATA write back. Rosens admonition captures the game-changing shift in audience due to the read/write web. Audience having been such a dilemma for composition studies, it is a short hop from acknowledging the beauty of Rosens recognition of the PFKATA to the reification of it in Wikipedia to launching writing students into the maelstrom that is Wikipedia editing. Using the highly collaborative and contested environment of Wikipedia as a writing platform allows a more concrete understanding of the new digitally embodied audience than traditional classroom writing (including writing to bots software programs that write back). Writing in and about Wikipedia encourages students to think about the outcomes of their writing and, by extension, changes the student/teacher relationship in pedagogically useful ways. Ultimately this article is about giving some examples of this environment and suggesting why it is pedagogically important, robots and all.

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Copyright 2012 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

Consider Your Audience Is Changing

Rosens posting is often cited in media studies, and it should also have a profound influence in composition studies. Rosens blog post dramatically calls into question the transforming nature of audience in the twenty-first century. In the read/ write web, the spatial and temporal encounters between writers and their readers frequently converge. Rosen writes, The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable. As writing instructors, we search for environments in which our students can write to a realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable audience. We have taught too many traditional writing assignments in which the audience is the instructor (and possibly the writers peers) or where the audience is imaginary and artificially constructed (and, yes, we recognize Walter Ongs admonition that the audience is always fictional, but in terms of degrees, these artificial audiences are really, really fictional); at least in the former situation, the writers know the audience. In the latter circumstance, however, this rhetorical situation produces writing that is six degrees removed from a pulse, which makes sense because the imaginary audience is literally lifeless. Though we had started our first stumbling effort into Wikipedia before reading it, now we would like to blame Robert E. Cummingss Lazy Virtues:Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia for our current writing pedagogy. One aspect that Cummings highlights is the notion of authenticity, especially in regard to audience.1 Cummings notes one of the primary challenges of composition classrooms: Most assignments ask writers to imagine an audienceand then to compose for their composition instructor as a surrogate for that idealized, fictional audience (5). May the gods forgive us, weve done this, but the first step to recovery is admitting we had a problem, and, yes, we do have a problem. However, we are constantly seeking alternatives to this moribund dynamic. In more dire moments, we ask ourselves who would read the student writing that we assign: sadly and too frequently, the only people who would read this student writing are we, the teachers. Enter Wikipedia, which allow[s] students to write for an authentic audience beyond the classroom and where these audiences often write back (Cummings 5).This interaction echoes Rosen: the audience is no longer static and imaginable but dynamic and real. We no longer need to play at the audience evoked (Ede and Lunsford); we happen to have, like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, Marshall McLuhan right here. We do not have to keep the audience stranded at the classroom door anymore. A growing and important body of composition scholarship focuses on how Wikipedia invites its audience into the social construction of knowledge and the benefits of this for student writing and thinking about writing. Paula Patch, writing in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, highlights Wikipedias advantages as a teaching tool when addressing research. In one part of her course, Patch provides direct instruction in navigating and evaluating Wikipedia articles, a strategy that can then be adapted to responsibly navigating, evaluating, and selecting evidence from all media, online and print (279). She is confident that by the end of the course unit, the experience makes students smarter consumers of online information and more
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responsible researchers (281). Meghan Sweeney, also writing in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, expands Wikipedia as a teaching tool so that students are actively contributing to Wikipedia articles. Sweeney suggests that [b]y contributing to Wikipedia, students switch from consumers to producers and subsequently change their relationship with Wikipedia and, by extension, with composing overall (256). Instructors can use Wikipedia in a number of ways. Students can write about Wikipedia, but as Sweeney shows, students can also write in Wikipedia.This is also the approach that we advocate. James P. Purdy in his article When the Tenets of Composition Go Public: A Study of Writing in Wikipedia analyzes what happens when students write in Wikipedia:
When students become contributors to this space, they can come to see themselves as composers who create meaning through writing rather than only as novices who are cowed and intimidated by the sources of experts. This shift in perspective is an important step in students learning to engage in conversation with their sources, a skill we often try to teach in our composition courses. (366)

Having students working to improve Wikipedia articles is a critical aspect of this work. When students initially enter the Wikipedia world, they are frequently cowed, and if their first edits are reverted, they can feel intimidated by the sources of experts. However, if they persist (and encouraging that persistence must be a part of the instructors role), they will begin to make the shift Purdy describes. Besides, it is not as if the students are dissuaded from working in Wikipedia.Wikipedia itself admonishes us:
Just do it! The Wikipedia community encourages users to be bold when updating the encyclopedia. . . . We would like everyone to be bold and help make Wikipedia a better encyclopedia. . . . Wikipedia not only allows you to add, revise, and edit articles: it wants you to do it. (Wikipedia:Be bold; emphasis in the original)

Patch, Sweeney, and Purdy all recognize that Wikipedia is practically begging users to join in the social construction of knowledge, to build, to respond, to use writing to do something in the worldthe whole world, not just the classroomand Wikipedias approach to audience is one of the main catalysts for this collaborative action. The shift that we ask students to make from knowledge consumers to knowledge co-creators is seismic.The read/write environment within the Wikipedia community is an antidote to static and artificial writing students frequently do in classrooms.The desire for an alternative writing environment is certainly an ancient one, but more recently it has been a lament within composition and rhetoric studies for almost thirty years. James A. Reither, writing in a 1985 issue of College English, bemoans the state of much academic writing when he asserts that writing instructors need to find ways to immerse writing students in academic knowledge/discourse communities so they can write from within those communities (624).Ten years after Reither, Joseph Petraglia, in his article in the Journal of Advanced Composition, coins the expression pseudo-transactional writing, which is writing solely intended to meet teacher expectations rather than engage in a transference of information for
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the purposes of informing the uninformed or demonstrating mastery over context. Wikipedia provides the discourse community Reither seeks, while also providing the escape from Petraglias pseudo-transactional writing that we have beenand, sadly, still areassigning students. In place of the pseudo-transactional, we strive for what Petraglia, riffing on the work of James Britton, describes as transactional writing, which does not pretend to function in any way other than it does; in this sense, its rhetorical aims are transparent, its purported audience and purposes are authentic. Put in the language of our students, transactional writing is the writing that occurs in the real world, which in their eyes always exists outside of academia, thus indirectly condemning academia and much of academic writing as unreal. To our students Wikipedia clearly is not academic. Writing in an environment that demands high-level collaboration and critical thinking, where a students contributions can be viewed by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, is an effective dose of reality, both for our students and for us. Ultimately, writing in Wikipedia is different because the audience not only is real but frequently responds, as Cummings notes. James E. Porters exploration of the relationship of audience to discourse community in Audience and Rhetoric: An Archaeological Composition of the Discourse Community, published in 1992, some ten years prior to the creation of Wikipedia, seems positively prescient. Porter argues, The division between writer and reader breaks down in the discourse community; from the social perspective the discourse community is at once the producer and consumer of its own discourse (84). Using Rosens logic, Porters analysis extends to the PFKATA in Wikipedia, who will consider writing and responding according to the rules of the Wikipedia discourse community. For students working in Wikipedia, they experience the permeability of the writer/reader division firsthand: where they were once readers and consumers of Wikipedia articles, they find themselves also writing and producing Wikipedia articles. The movement of Porters discourse community into the online environment as Rosens PFKATA changes the audience game in the composition classroom. In 1992, Porter noted that the common command of the writing teacher to Consider your audience was not a simple task (3, 6). It is still not simple, but the good news is the discourse community is telling us its expectations, both specific and general, on pages like Wikipedia:Manual of Style and Wikipedia:Five Pillars. It is making itself more tangible and immediate. When a writer attempts to meet these criteria through a contribution to the community, the community will write back, often with lightning speed. What could only be theorized and amorphous in the past is made immediately present here. That offers the possibility of making the learning more present as well.
Our Course: Launching Pad to the Wikiverse

As is the case for most two-year college instructors, the bulk of our teaching load consists of first-year composition courses (both developmental and college level).The second-semester freshman English class described here focuses on research writing.

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It begins with a review of current popular literature about Wikipedia. As of this writing, this includes articles such as Tushar Raes Wikipedias Editing Process Is Still a Mystery to Students from the Chronicle of Higher Educations Wired Campus blog; Clay Shirkys WikipediaAn Unplanned Miracle from the Guardian; and Jon Brodkins The 10 Biggest Hoaxes in Wikipedias First 10 Years in PCWorld. The first writing assignment is an analysis of one of the debates about Wikipedia raised in the literature review articles. With the students having dipped their toes in the broader cultural debates around Wikipedia, the second major assignment introduces them to the specific criteria for crafting a Wikipedia article and asks them to analyze one article and explain how it could be improved to meet these criteria. Informed by these macro- and micro-level analyses of Wikipedia, students in the next assignment work in groups to edit a Wikipedia article and document this process in a separate collaborative document. Students work extensively in Wikipedia during this assignment and often interact with other Wikipedians as the students try to work to the criteria established by the Wikipedia discourse community. (This is where the fireworks happen that inspired this article and that we will detail shortly.) The final major writing assignment of the semester asks students to reflect on their readings, writings, and experience during the semester and analyze anew some aspect of Wikipedia or the debates around it in light of the knowledge they have gained. As their instructors are doing now, students often comment on Wikipedias assertive audience in these final analyses and reflections.2
Open the Pod Bay Door . . .

So, what does this audience look like? Robots.Yes, to twist Obi-wans words,These are the droids youre looking for.Wikipedia is crawling with robots, known as bots. These are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. . . . that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone, and they are our friends (Internet bot). Like HAL 9000 and Skynet, these bots talk back, but unlike their sci-fi counterparts, they do not try to kill the interlocutor. Lets start with a simple example: SineBot. SineBot signs users names on Talk pages when users forget to do this themselves (User:SineBot).Talk pages in Wikipedia are pages where editors discuss edits they are making or plan to make to a Wikipedia article in order to try to reach consensus. An automated message from SineBot explains that having Talk page comments signed is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when they said it.Thank youand such a polite bot (SineBot). Thus, SineBot is tasked with making collaborative knowledge making easier: if I know who you are, it is easier to make knowledge with you. From an audience standpoint, SineBot is an immediate, embodied audience member telling the writer, Hey, you forgot something.The writer does not have to consider SineBots reaction; in fact, it is the very act of forgetting SineBots reaction that brings it to the rescue. As journalist and blogger Tim Porter writes in response to Rosens diatribe,The publisher-audience relationship remains, but today

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it is a loop, not a pipe. This is the new, feedback loop with a touch of automation thrown in, the Bots Now Known as the Audience (BNKATA). However, SineBot is a fairly simple version of the BNKATA. Our favorite bot on Wikipedia is the one that has struck student editors most often in our experience, and it strikes because it has been programmed not to trust them.Yes, there is a bot programmed to determine the writers level of ethos. XlinkBot does what its name suggests: it deletes links to other URLs from Wikipedia pages. However, it doesnt just delete any link from any editors. It focuses on links that are frequently misused by new and anonymous users (User:XLinkBot). XLinkBot is programmed to judge whether an edit can be trusted based on two variables: the experience of the editor and the usefulness of the source URL across the experience of previous editors and in conjunction with Wikipedia policies, especially those related to copyright in this case. For example, editor Lyn3636, a student in one of our sections, added a link to the official YouTube video for the song The Nobodies by Marilyn Manson to the article The Nobodies (song) on March 6, 2011 (Revision History of The Nobodies (song)). One minute later, XLinkBot deleted the full edit because [m]any YouTube videos of newscasts, shows or other content of interest to Wikipedia visitors are copyright violations and should not be linked to, although [t]here is no blanket ban on linking to YouTube or other user-submitted video sites (Wikipedia:External links; emphasis in the original). This proviso is important because it shows that XLinkBot is programmed to make a trust decision whether to allow the link or not, and the history of this particular link proves that. Since this link was to the official video, XLinkBot guessed wrong, as the page Wikipedia:WikiProject Songs explains one can link to videos that have been uploaded by the musician(s), the record companies, or Vevo. This video is on Vevo. However, the wrong guess by XLinkBot was based on the fact that this was Lyn3636s second-ever edit on Wikipedia, and it was a link to YouTube. Odds were on XLinkBots side. When editor PerfesserC reinstated the deleted link two weeks later (said user having an awe-inspiring seventeen edits at the time) with a brief explanation, the link stayed (Revision history of The Nobodies (song)). As of this writing, the edit remains. PerfesserC could be trusted; Lyn3636 could not.3 In this moment, Lyn3636 learns in an immediate and practical way what the discourse community values and even how to manipulate the audience to get the desired outcome, even when the audience is a software program. But wait, theres more! Interestingly, XLinkBot does not just extract the URL from the offending edit; it deletes everything added with the link. While designed as the most efficient way to delete links and not leave articles a complete mess (see discussion at User:XLinkBot/FAQ), this mechanism also has the effect of getting an editors attention. On April 8, 2010, editor Tameika05 was working in the article Abortion in Panama (Revision history of Abortion in Panama). Over the course of six hours,Tameika05 added over a thousand words to the article, restructured it, and added a list of references. Unfortunately, at the end of this process, Tameika05 also added a link to a page in the website About.com. In less than
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a minute XLinkBot removed all of the six hours work. In an email, Tameika05, also known as Tameika Williams, explains her response to these events:
I am so frustrated and confused, [a classmate] and I were working on our article Abortion in Panama[;] wed changed the structure and added additional information. Then I get a message [from XLinkBot] and our whole entire progress that we made so far was deleted . . . . I was citing the sources we used and it was general information that was not biased. I am frustrated and do not know what to do. Or even what was done wrong. The only thing I had NOT done was fill out the edit summary each time. Please help me because I am now lost. (Williams)

XLinkBot has just handed Williams and her instructor an excellent learning moment, and despite her frustration,Williams is already problem-solving and analyzing in this email. She is listing the things she knows she did correctly: citing information, using neutral point of view and unbiased information.This makes a writing teachers heart proud. She then admits to one expectation of the discourse community in which she failedwriting the edit summariessearching for the trigger for the bot attack. Finally, she reaches out to the instructor for help. In this situation the instructor gets to play the role of adviser rather than evaluator because the evaluation has already been done. A very different kind of conversation can now take place between the student-as-editor and the instructor than would have taken place had the instructor done the evaluation. As teacher Carra Leah Hood writes in her own article about teaching with Wikipedia, reading and editing activities [in Wikipedia] require reflection on both the content of an entry and the effectiveness of the writing to convey that content. That is exactly what Williams is doing in this email (a piece of transactional writing itself) because Wikipedia delivers pedagogy, a pedagogy familiar to writers and to teachers of writing (Hood). In this case, that pedagogy was delivered by the BNKATA.
Ground Control to Major Tom

Not all exchanges on Wikipedia possess that disconcerting Bladerunner vibe; actual human beings devote their time, talents, and skills to improving Wikipedia articles, using what Clay Shirky describes as their cognitive surplus.As a novice Wikipedia editor, student Jeremiah Cunningham began the semester uninspired and antagonistic toward working in Wikipedia. Writing in his end-of-the-semester reflective analytical essay, Cunningham notes, From the outside looking in, Wikipedias approach to sharing information seemed unpredictable at best. However, over the course of the semester, as he goes deep into the heart of Wikipedia, Cunninghams perspective shifts: when stepping into [Wikipedias] world of editing and sharing, a very different picture emerges where information that is shared is not only reliable but also admirable. Cunninghams experiences in Wikipedia highlight the tightly threaded relationship between knowledge making and audience. He writes about an experience he had early in the semester. He was attempting to edit the article Further In, which is about an album created by the folk musician Greg Brown.The further
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into the editing process Cunningham goes, the more he learns from the Wikipedia discourse community. When Cunninghams class collaborator adds biographical information about Greg Brown to the album article, it is immediately removed, but the editor Airproofing takes the time in the articles talk page to write: The biography information that is being put on this page does not belong here. This is an album page. It is more appropriate for that information to go on Browns own biography page (Airproofing). Cunningham notes, [Airproofings] reasoning for completely editing out the information we had added made good sense as tough as it was to swallow. While still working on Further In, an edit made by Cunningham is removed, again with an explanation by a Wikipedian named Iknow23. Cunningham acknowledges that the reasoning behind the edits [made by Iknow23] provided more of a learning experience for me the novice editor and viewer [than] the experience of making our own addition to the article did (Cunningham; our emphasis). This is astonishing learning, one in which the collaborative knowledge making within the discourse asks the student to move quickly between the roles of writer, reader, knowledge consumer, and knowledge producer. Cunningham isnt thinking abstractly about who his audience is; instead, he is acting and reacting in a collaborative knowledge-making effort with interested and more established Wikipedians. He is learning how to write and think in very specific, concrete ways. Cunningham had one more editing exchange, this one a bit harsh by his own estimation. As the novice Wikipedian, Cunningham could not find the talk page in the beginning for the Further In article that was right in front of my very eyes, so instead he created a talk page as part of the WikiProject Albums page. For the uninitiated, the WikiProject Albums page consists of an organization of Wikipedians dedicated to improving Wikipedias coverage of all kinds of musical albums (Wikipedia: WikiProject Albums). These folks are committed and knowledgeable. Imagine walking into a party where everyone is clearly smarter than you are, and you can begin to imagine Cunninghams context. For Cunningham to move his Further In talk page to the WikiProject Albums page was an egregious affront, and editor IllaZilla had no problem indicating the essential wrongness of this action. IllaZilla took me behind the proverbial Wikipedia woodshed, while also asking important questions of our project and point[ing] it in the right direction.This is a remarkable exchange for Cunningham, one that opens his eyes to the Wikipedia discourse community. He and IllaZilla had several more talks back and fourth about this dilemma. Not all of them were civil but all of them were respectful and all of them from my standpoint were very productive. Cunningham even took the time to explore IllaZillas Wikipedia profile page, where he found that IllaZilla was an editor who had advanced many articles in Wikipedia through its grading scale and some to the point of being a featured article (User: IllaZilla). Because Cunningham spent time exploring the backchannels of knowledge making within Wikipediaan articles revision history, an articles talk page, a Wikipedians profile pagehe appreciated how well the system worked. I also came to the realization of how admirable it was that so many would take the time and energy to advance the education and learning of others worldwide and never receive any credit or
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praise for it (Cunningham). Cunninghams willingness to engage and explore leads to some high-level, high-touch learning wherein his instructors are the PFKATA. However, because we are his official instructors, our relationship with Cunningham is weighted with the conventions of schoolinggrading, authority roles, ingrained notions of accountabilityand these can, in fact, hamper learning. Outside the frame of schooling, the PFKATA avoid these pitfalls. No matter how hard we could have tried, there is nothing in a pseudo-transactional writing assignment that we could have designed that would come close to the kind of feedback and learning Cunningham experienced through our assignments but outside the classroom. Lest Cunninghams learning appear too general in its focus on higher-order thinking and discourse communities, the PFKATA can deal with specific style and grammar concerns as well. On April 6, 2011, user Walklee3 added a small edit to the article Brothers (The Black Keys album) (Revision history of Brothers). Later that same day, editor F6119474 copyedited some of these additions to adhere to Wikipedias neutral point-of-view policy, which is important enough to the community to be one of the Five Pillars of Wikipedia (Wikipedia:Five pillars). In this case, that edit changed the sentence The album debuted at an incredible #3 spot on the Billboard 200 removing an incredible and spot. The word prominent was removed from another sentence. These minor changes represent, of course, a huge shift in the presentation of the material. F6119474 explained in the edit summary This addition was biased. Not to be deterred,Walklee3 re-added the same words to the article within the hour. Thus, the PFKATA can be ignored just as instructors so often are, but this is not the end of the story. The next day, the discourse community returned to the article in the form of editor Ffirehorse. Ffirehorse again removed an incredible and spot and took the opportunity to get even more granular by following up with a grammar edit, correctly moving the apostrophe in groups to groups. On April 17, editor Red Dwarf took care of prominent, just to be clear that it did not escape unscathed (Revision history of Brothers). Clearly, the PFKATA loop can provide valuable feedback at multiple levels as [e]valuation of writing occurs immediately and as an ongoing activity throughout the process of text construction in Wikipedia (Hood). For these to changes to be useful, of course, the students must reflect on them.That reflection occurs in face-to-face conversations with students as they try to strategize ways to satisfy Wikipedia editors like Ffirehorse. It occurs in moments like Williamss email as students write their way through negotiating the expectations of other Wikipedia editors on the fly. It also occurs in the more intentional, reflective writing of the final essay, like Cunninghams ruminations above. All of these furtive forays around, about, and into Wikipedia speak to students growing awareness of themselves as communicators in a relationship with readers, who in turn are themselves communicating. James Porter crystalizes this relationship when he writes:
The first goal of the writer is socialization into the community, which requires an understanding of the communitys unstated assumptions as well as its explicit conventions and intertextuality. The writer has to become a full-fledged memW i k i p e d i a , t h e Pe o p l e F o r m e r ly K n ow n a s t h e A u d i e n c e

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ber in order to achieve identification within a community. Audience analysis is not merely collecting facts about the audience [. . .]. Rather the writers job is to understand the community and adopt an appropriate ethos within it. (J. E. Porter 112)

When writing in Wikipedia works, these rhetorical maneuvers, tactics, and strategies are precisely what is happening. As writing instructors, we continually refine our pedagogy and curriculum in search of the elusive moment when our students can experience what is at stake when writers write. In the twenty-first century, readers read and frequently respond. Sometimes gently, sometimes harshly, student writers in Wikipedia learn the discursive rules, either as foregrounded in instruction (Patch; Sweeney) or as taught to them by other Wikipedians.
Conclusion:The Right Stuff

We came to Jay Rosens PFKATA way of thinking, and much of our enthusiasm for exploring the possibilities of writing in digital environments, via Clay Shirkys Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Shirkys writings push one to imagine composition classrooms untethered from the 8- x 11-inch sheet of paper. In Cognitive Surplus, Shirky writes:
Old logic, television logic, treated audiences as little more than collections of individuals. Their members didnt create any real value for one another. The logic of digital media, on the other hand, allows the people formerly known as the audience to create value for one another every day. (42)

By extension, this assertion recognizes Wikipedias potential for rich exchanges between students writing in Wikipedia and the PFKATA or BNKATA responding: the outcome of the exchange is value for one another every day.The point of sharing these stories is to reveal that value and the richness of the writing environment that Wikipedia offers and its intersection with progressive and technologically adept composition pedagogy.This isnt just a cool toy; its a serious learning environment not available in traditional writing classrooms. At the level of practice, we also just wanted to provide snapshots of what teachers and students can expect in this world and at least in part to provide a warning. What we have here are robots and people, cranky and helpful, doing our jobs for us. That can seem a little odd, but also wonderful. Teaching writing has always been impossible to do alone anyway, especially when it comes to questions of audience.Thats why so much ink has been spilled over this concept in particular. As recently as June 2011, College Composition and Communication, in an episode of its constructive poster series, tackled a definition of audience once again and ran into this new reality:
Increasingly, studentslike all composersare also composing for public and distant audiences via the Web. These audiences can be particularly difficult to write for given that we cant always know in advance who they are. At the same time, these audiences can be very helpful when, for example, they respond [. . .]
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to drafts, showing the composers how a given text is being interpreted by a reader. (753)

We recognize as a discipline that the audience has been made more real here at the end of the Gutenberg parenthesis, but if our department is any indication, many writing instructors continue asking students to write to invoked audiences (and we readily implicate ourselves). We can still encourage students to think about, or imagine, an audience. Undoubtedly, that can be a useful exercise for any writing we are trying to imagine you right nowas far as it goes. However, as our examples show, now when writers want to share their work, the imagining can stop because in less than a minute the Wikipedians may be here. Theyll let the writer know exactly who the audience is and what is going to change, and we dont have to imagine the writer or the audience anymore because the world where we are all the people formerly known as the audience is here. Weve seen it, and things can get rough in here. Be prepared. We hope that helps. <
Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Jeff Sommers, the three TETYC reviewers, colleague Dominic Saucedo, and Amanda Roll-Kuhne for their insightful and constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Notes

1. We understand the difficulty of the term authenticity in high theory discussions of epistemology. However, it serves a purpose for this argument. The authentic audience is the being that actually reads ones writing and responds to it. 2. Course materials are publicly displayed and available at <http:engl1111 .pbworks.com>. See Creel, Kuhne, and Saucedo for full citation information. 3. PerfesserC is one of the coauthors of this article.
Works Cited

Airproofing. Talk: Further In. Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation. 16 Nov. 2010. Web. 15 Mar. 2012. Annie Hall. Dir.Woody Allen. Perf.Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, and Tony Roberts. MGM, 1977. Film. Audience. College Composition and Communication 62.4 (2011): 753. Print. Brodkin, Jon. The 10 Biggest Hoaxes in Wikipedias First 10 years. New Zealand PC World, 17 Jan. 2011. Web. 1 May 2012. Creel, Gill, Michael Kuhne, and Dominic Saucedo. Front Page: English 1111.
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Michael Kuhne teaches at Minneapolis Community and Technical College and has collaborated joyfully with Gill Creel for many years. Gill Creel teaches at Minneapolis Community and Technical College and continues to collaborate with Michael Kuhne, despite the pain.
W i k i p e d i a , t h e Pe o p l e F o r m e r ly K n ow n a s t h e A u d i e n c e

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