Help:New articles

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The best (and only) way to start a new article is to do it. You are the maker. Either enter a link somewhere to your nascent page and then click on it, or create the page with a title for it in the "new page" box to the lower left. Either method will bring up an edit box, and by entering something and saving it, you will have your new page. Wikipedia offers instructions about how to start a page and on all other aspects of editing your work and that of others. But starting a page and developing a new article are tasks of different scales of effort. Here we consider the new article, not as starting a page, but as developing a significant idea through a process of peer production, of collaborative work in a digital commons.

[edit] Prolegomenon

In actuality, constructing new articles is highly iterative. Get started. Mark something as a {{stub}} if it is just a beginning. Working in a Wiki is engaging in part because it offers a continual sense of anticipation. In reality: In a Wiki all articles are forever new articles. The power of a Wiki is its power to channel many small steps towards the collaborative achievement of big things. So the essence is to make a beginning, to return with additions, revisions, adjustments, a new thought, surprise at what someone else has stuck in, a sense of autonomous participation in an evolving work of mutual intelligence.

We work incrementally. But while building something, bit by bit, we need to have ideas about its structure, what features will give it strength, a comprehensible form enabling us to work together, increment by increment, to erect the structure, which will then stand as a stable, habitable part of our cultural surroundings, continually refurbished by those dwelling within it.

StudyPlace aims to advance knowledge and understanding about what educates. To do so, we cannot simply build a hut here or there off in the bog of blogs. Our global commons is an urban, big-city place, and those dwelling in it are urbane folks who jostle together and build high. They are accustomed to zoned spaces, traffic controls, buildings constructed according to a plan, complex distribution systems. They are improvisational all the time, but they are improvisational in large part because they also know how to internalize reasoned codes and work within, or just beyond, those limits to effect their autonomous purposes. In doing so, they disclose the creative possibilities enabled through the codes and they acquire the experiential ground for revising and changing the codes.

StudyPlace has an initial, reasoned code or format for new articles. This format will never be evident at the actual beginning. Builders start by digging a hole and making a mess. But to build a big, strong structure, its plan and the standards it should meet should be there in potentia throughout the process. Like the humans who originate them, new articles have a prolonged period of development. Through it, let us give them a strong digital structure. Towards that end, what follows outlines a highly organized process. With each new article, the mess of real construction will only manifest its structured particulars fully as the article arrives at a stage of proximate completion. What follows explains suggested procedures for sustaining new articles through an extended gestation, resulting in a collaborative work of high achievement. It explains both a rationale and a set of mechanics, with the rationale and mechanics embodied in a set of templates for use at one time or another in the process of development.

And like everything else, these procedures are themselves works emerging from a self-creating process. To the degree possible, contributors should use them, adapting them as the occasion merits to the particulars at hand, and revising them in a continual rethinking of the ideal type in light of working experience. This is a large challenge and towards meeting it, diverse contributors may want to use The Commons to develop ideas about how best to make peer production conducive to the advancement of learning.

To practice what we preach, help develop Help:New articles context for the context page to this article.

[edit] Procedure rationale

StudyPlace will thrive and grow as you start new articles and edit existing ones. With the exception of navigation hubs, anyone is free and welcome to write on anything within an expansive understanding of the question, What educates?

Add and edit in collaboration with others: that is the essence of peer production.

By conversing, explaining, reflecting, and reviewing, we seek to advance knowledge and understanding about what educates. As Francis Bacon long ago showed, the advancement of learning takes forethought and intellectual discipline. Peer production in a digital commons is relatively new and thoughtful people are still discovering and disclosing the intellectual conventions that will be most conducive to the advance of knowledge and understanding in the 21st century and beyond. In the sixteenth century, it took some time for the conventions of a standard title page to emerge and take hold in printed books. To advance knowledge and understanding about what educates through StudyPlace, we should take some care to adopt effective procedures for producing our work.

Works achieved in a digital commons differ in deeply significant ways from those produced through mechanical reproduction. We need to take those differences into account. The digital commons enables text to take on a fluidity and permeability that is not feasible with texts embodied in physical objects. As with other fundamental qualities, fluidity and permeability can conduce towards the advance or the degradation of knowledge and understanding, depending on how people work with such qualities. Potentially they provide for the faster report and correction of errors, but in the absence of good procedures for doing so, they could potentially support a Babel-effect, in which it is harder and harder to discriminate the truth from falsehood, wisdom from folly, and honesty from deception.

A specific danger with peer production in a digital commons arises because the identify of the producing peers is not evident. In an era of possessive authorship, the title page identified a work, its author, and a publisher, establishing a fixed text and a responsible provenance for it. In a digital commons, the work becomes fluid, its author a complex, continuous collaboration, and its publisher something approximating a common carrier. Without effort to accumulate, preserve, and present it, the identify of who is creating — and how creating is occurring — blurs away. Those working in the digital commons must be alert to the irony that peer production by invisible peers may lead over time to the regression of learning, not its advancement.

With this danger in mind, StudyPlace is developing a two stage process for adding and editing articles, in effect significantly expanding the traditional title page of a printed work so that the peerhood of a peer production process is made explicit. Wikipedia made a major step in this direction by attaching a Talk page to every substantive page where editors can comment and criticize contributions, plan activities, and allocate effort. Reading talk pages can illuminate a topic almost as much as the article on it in some cases.

On StudyPlace, we are currently trying to augment the function of the Talk pages in order to give the peerhood of an article more effectively by establishing discussing the ideal intellectual context of a topic as well as helping to work out the process of collaboration. Generally, on StudyPlace, the Talk page will have two pats — Study and Talk.

• In the Study part, you can note and outline key ideas, indicate important questions to be addressed, selectively marshal the available literature, and suggest experiential insights about what educates or miseducates with respect to the article. The Study section will create a current state-of-the-art, as well as a pertinent condition-of-life, which will together serve as intellectual and experiential context for the creative work on the article page, its peerhood. Usually, the Study section will set out a fuller set of questions, ideas, and resources than the text of the actual article will do justice to in its current state. Thus, the Study section will indicate the standards that the editors of an article should meet and the lower the gap between the ideal mastery indicated in the Study section and the evident grounding of the actual article, the more authority readers can accord to the article.
• In the Talk part, discuss matters of coordination with other editors. Wikis like StudyPlace are not managed in a top-down, hierarchical manner. Often productive collaboration happens spontaneously; occasionally editors need to discuss ideas, work out disagreements or misunderstanding, or plan how to allocate effort. Use the Talk section for such purposes. There is a good explanation of conventions for doing so on