One of the many research skills projects assigned to us University College Cork MA students this year, was a rather unusual endeavour within the academic sphere, that being to edit a page on the infamous encyclopedic website Wikipedia a page pertinent of course to our respective theses. The build up to said assignment was a grand affair with my fellow students (myself, included) actively panicking the week before about the varied aspects involved. However, all of the stress was found to be futile as the in-class exercise was productive and at times quite fun. Encountering a problem with my laptop’s wifi connection within the room in which I would embark upon this first editing foray we moved to another room higher up in the building in order for me and my friends to garner a better internet connection. Various connectivity problems still ensued even in the much better situated room, but eventually everyone began to tentatively edit their pages, live tweet and blog about their work with the aim of getting the assignment trending in the area under the hashtag #EditWikiLit.
Another one of the predicaments I was faced with during this assignment was my sheer inability to screenshot my edits on Wikipedia, screenshots necessary in order to prove that we did, in fact edit them in the first place due to Wikipedia being continuously edited and altered every minute of every day. Once I was proficiently educated enough by my lecturer to screenshot my edits I felt like a computer genius for lack of a better term and proceeded to work on correcting the various problems with my page.
Choosing the Charlotte Brontë novel Villette as the page where I would make my first nerve fueled corrections, I began by screen shooting some small spelling corrections I had made to the page and adding some information by literary critics. My thesis is in essence concerned with the psychological effects of insular, repressive spaces in the work of Charlotte Brontë with comparisons of the lone displaced woman Brontë is lauded for creating, with American writers’ various Gothic female figures and the effects of this displacement and these spaces upon their respective psyches, and no better novel exemplifies this than Brontë’s Villette.
Inserting hyperlinks was also a difficulty which I somehow managed to figure out on my own in miraculous fashion if I do say so myself, by simply following a rather easy instruction manual from a quick Google search. Feeling accomplished from first creating a Wikipedia account a week prior and then editing small sections of the page this tiny hyperlink insertion was an elating exercise for me. Simple problems with the page such as spelling mistakes were corrected, and I added more background information about the novel into the themes section as well as links to critical analysis and articles by a number of journalists who wrote upon the novel.
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