Matthew A. Vetter

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania

The advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022 catalyzed a wave of excitement and apprehension, but especially fear. This article examines the dystopian narratives that emerged after ChatGPT’s release date. Through a critical analysis of media responses, we uncover how dystopian imaginaries discussing ChatGPT become rhetorically constructed in popular, jou...

As a collaboratively edited and open-access knowledge archive, Wikipedia offers a vast dataset for training artificial intelligence (AI) applications and models, enhancing data accessibility and access to information. However, reliance on the crowd-sourced encyclopedia raises ethical issues related to data provenance, knowledge production, curation...

Table 1. An evolving framework of the five rhetorical canons, including the classical understanding, digital understanding, and GenAI-assisted understanding.

Guided by the scholarly understanding of generative artificial intelligence, this study explores technical writing students’ engagement with ChatGPT during their writing process. This study is informed by the classical five canons of rhetoric, along with the contemporary reinterpretations of the canons. Employing a qualitative analysis of interview...

Almost two years after the initial shock with generative artificial intelligence, as a community of professionals in the teaching of writing we are still wondering how to integrate it into our practice, what implications it may have, and how best to prepare for it. While the conversation has only just begun, we can already approach experiences, res...

Given Wikipedia's breadth of coverage, social impact, and longevity as an impactful open knowledge resource, the encyclopedia has been the subject of considerable interdisciplinary research. Building on scholarship related to collaboration, authorship, ownership, and editing in Wikipedia, this study sought to better understand Wikipedians as writer...

This paper explores the potential of a ‘more-than-digital’ view toward agency and authorship in the postdigital era. By examining students’ narratives of their interactions with ChatGPT, this research contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversation on the relationship between humans and AI in educational contexts. This study explores college unde...

Despite being subtitled “the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” Wikipedia's editors are not nearly as diverse as Wikimedia, its nonprofit parent organization, would hope. In fact, the English version's encyclopedic community has long suffered from gender inequality in both its editorial demographic and its coverage of content representing a...

Use these categories and questions to guide discussions at the level of the classroom, department, and discipline.

"Contributor or Commodity: Inequities of Labor and Representation in Wikidata" explores ethical issues related to contributor alienation and motivation, unequal gender representation, and data labor in Wikidata, Wikipedia's sister project that provides free, machine-readable, structured data.

Ethical frameworks for text generators (TGs) in education are generally concerned with person-alized instruction, a dependency on data, biases in training data, academic integrity, and lack of creativity from students. While broad-level, institutional guidelines provide value in understanding the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence (AI) f...

Wikipedia’s founding in 2001, accompanied by the techno-optimism of Web 2.0 and the ambitious agenda for free knowledge, inspired countless volunteers to contribute. The success of the encyclopedia both inspired and provided evidence of the power of “wikinomics,” “crowd-sourcing,” and “commons-based peer production.” In many ways, Wikipedia, and it...

Despite pushback from regulatory and non-governmental entities, Meta’s control over the public narrative remains consistent. Using a method of corpus analysis, this paper investigated the company’s sociotechnical imaginary as it circulates in media artifacts (n=428) responding to Zuckerberg’s 2021 Metaverse announcement. Analysis of how these artif...

Is Wikidata's adoption of the CC Zero license a gift to the commons or a surrender to the corporate web? We propose a combined presentation + roundtable session to delve into the ethical problems surrounding Wikidata, the collaborative knowledge graph project that aims to provide structured data to support Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Wi...

This article aims to fill the existing gap in the research which indicates that few researchers have examined multilingual writers' preference between audio and written feedback, and the impact of feedback format on their revision process in a U.S. composition class. To explore these, eight multilingual writers were interviewed, and their first dra...

Despite pushback from regulatory and non-governmental entities, Meta’s control over the public narrative remains consistent. Using a method of corpus analysis, this paper investigated the company’s sociotechnical imaginary as it circulates in media artifacts (n=428) responding to Zuckerberg’s 2021 Metaverse announcement. Analysis of how these artif...

In a previous Writing Spaces essay entitled, "Wikipedia Is Good for You!?," James P. Purdy introduces us to the idea that the online encyclopedia , often devalued in educational spaces, can serve as a starting place for research and a process guide to research-based writing. By observing how Wikipedia editors review each other's work, have conversa...

Volumes in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing offer multiple perspectives on a wide range of topics about writing. In each chapter, authors present their unique views, insights, and strategies for writing by addressing the undergraduate reader directly. Drawing on their own experiences, these teachers-as-writers invite students to join in the larg...

As immersive technology grows in popularity, universities are developing academic innovation labs (AIL) that often introduce students to virtual reality (VR) and other emerging cross reality applications. Although these labs help educate students on emerging technology, a more critical eye is needed to examine user experience (UX). This article rep...

Despite pushback from regulatory and non-governmental entities, Meta’s control over the public narrative remains consistent. Using a method of corpus analysis, this study investigated the company’s sociotechnical imaginary as it circulates in media artifacts (428) responding to Zuckerberg’s 2021 Metaverse announcement. Analysis of how these artifac...

Although Wikipedia uniquely challenges the boundaries of the encyclopedic genre in terms of collaboration, technology, authority, and knowledge production, it remains an encyclopedia, an epistemological method and forum that carries with it the ideological traces and functions of Enlightenment print culture. Such print culture manifests itself most...

Large media platforms are now in the habit of providing facts in their products and representing knowledge to various publics. For example, Google’s Knowledge Graph is a database of facts that Google uses to provide quick answers to publics who use their products, while Wikipedia has a product called Wikidata that similarly stores facts about the w...

Covid-19 and the public health policies emerging in response have laid bare a multiplicity of issues related to educational access and knowledge equity on a global scale. Among these, the quick shift to online and hybrid education models led teachers to adapt a plethora of digital platforms to deliver content and sponsor interactions). Such platfor...

Large media platforms are now in the habit of providing facts in their products and representing knowledge to various publics. For example, Google’s Knowledge Graph is a database of facts that Google uses to provide quick answers to publics who use their products, while Wikipedia has a product called Wikidata that similarly stores facts about the w...

Building on previous research related to information literacy and learning with Wikipedia, this article interprets Wikipedia editing practices as fulfilling the Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education to better understand Wikipedia pedagogy as an Open Educational Practice (OEP) th...

Volumes in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing offer multiple perspectives on a wide range of topics about writing. In each chapter, authors present their unique views, insights, and strategies for writing by addressing the undergraduate reader directly. Drawing on their own experiences, these teachers-as-writers invite students to join in the larg...

Beyond the work of policy and platform analysis, this chapter examines some of the Wikipedia community’s struggles in inclusivity and representation. The encyclopedia community has actually been quite good at acknowledging challenges related to systemic social biases related to gender and race and its reliance on print-centric epistemologies. Resea...

This chapter brings together the lessons learned through the previous chapters to understand and examine the fundamental spaces within Wikipedia’s tenets that continue to shape and influence how Wikipedia functions. Identifying some of these tenets and exposing their ideological formulations, we offer a way to critically engage and attend to these...

A contemporary examination of what information is represented, how that information is presented, and who gets to participate (and serve as gatekeeper) in the world's largest online repository for information, Wikipedia. Bridging contemporary education research that addresses the 'experiential epistemology' of learning to use Wikipedia with an und...

This chapter establishes the importance not only of Wikipedia as the world’s largest repository of knowledge but also how this knowledge system shapes what is possible and how we understand the world. We outline how Wikipedia works on a basic level and how its foundational “pillars” ideologically influence the construction of the encyclopedia, how...

This chapter examines what counts as information as we trace the construction credibility in the encyclopedia through examining Wikipedia’s policy of verifiability, which governs the editors’ selection and engagement with secondary sources to create mainspace article content and the policy of Neutral Point of View (NPOV), which influences the use o...

This chapter discusses how the encyclopedia decides what counts as knowledge through the policy of notability and as other guidelines. Since many women receive less press coverage than their male counterparts, Wikipedia’s representation of women is plagued by a larger systemic gender bias. In this manner, the notability policy is a double-edged swo...

In this chapter we argue that a feminist new materialist perspective provides a promising theoretical lens for understanding critical literacy learning through Wikipedia-based writing projects. Employing feminist new materialist theories of intra-action and lively assemblage, we examine the ways that college students compose Wikipedia articles to a...

This article examines textual artifacts surrounding Google Lens, an image recognition application, to reveal how it forwards reductive representations of the complex sets of relations constituted through locative media and augmented reality. Working across textual and posthumanist traditions, this article introduces a theoretical approach for inves...

Wikipedia's first twenty years: how what began as an experiment in collaboration became the world's most popular reference work. We have been looking things up in Wikipedia for twenty years. What began almost by accident—a wiki attached to a nascent online encyclopedia—has become the world's most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the sch...

This article argues for Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thons as feminist interventions and pedagogical events that facilitate participants’ Wikipedia literacy and acquisition of learning outcomes, especially critical thinking, digital literacy, and technical skills. Drawing on data collected at a Spring 2018 Edit-a-thon at Indiana University of Pe...

The fake news crisis points to a complex set of circumstances in which new media ecologies struggle to address challenges related to authenticity, rhetorical manipulation and disinformation, and the inability of traditional educational models to adequately teach toward critical information literacy. While social media sites such as Facebook acknowl...

Advances in both research and advocacy have demonstrated how Wikipedia-based education, as a movement, has grown exponentially in the last 10 years. As a result, academics know a lot more about specific learning outcomes that Wikipedia assignments might enable and are more familiar with issues of social equity (e.g., systemic biases related to gend...

Research in rhetoric and writing has found that Wikipedia-based education allows for direct and transparent observation of practices and concepts related to writing process, research, social collaboration, and digital rhetoric while also providing opportunities for authentic writing situations. However, much of this literature has been focused on u...

This paper explores Wikipedia bots and problematic information in order to consider implications for cultivating students’ critical media literacy. While we recognize the key role of Wikipedia bots in addressing and reducing problematic information (misinformation and disinformation) on the encyclopedia, it is ultimately reductive to construe bots...

PopeVolumes in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing offer multiple perspec-tives on a wide range of topics about writing. In each chapter, authors present their unique views, insights, and strategies for writing by ad-dressing the undergraduate reader directly. Drawing on their own ex-periences, these teachers-as-writers invite students to join in t...

Over the past decade, compositionists have made a number of claims about opportunities presented by Wikipedia for teaching writing. The encyclopedia allows for transparent observation of concepts and skills related to process, research, collaboration, and rhetoric. Beyond observation, Wikipedia allows for public writing with an authentic audience,...

Wikipedia's gender gaps, the result of a predominance of male editors and the correlating uneven participation and coverage of marginalized groups, are by now both well-known and well-documented (Cohen, 2011; Collier and Bear, 2012; Glott, Schmidt, and Ghosh, 2010; Gruwell, 2015; Wadewitz, 2013). This article seeks to interrogate these gaps in cove...

Wikipedia Edit-a-thons provide opportunities for students and faculty to (1) increase digital writing skills, (2) practice critical thinking and digital engagement surrounding issues related to information literacy and the politics of representation and access in digital spaces, and (3) make improvements to a public knowledge database (Wikipedia) a...

Successful in terms of size and scope, Wikipedia has faltered in accomplishing its founding goals of universal access and representation. While most of the scholarship addressing this issue focuses on the encyclopedia's gender gap, there remain significant problems with cultural and geographical representation of other marginalized topics. This art...

Wikipedia’s gender gap, which results in problems of representation attributed to the lack of women and non-male editors participating in the encylopedia’s production, is by now well-known and well-documented. A groundbreaking survey conducted in 2011, conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation, found that less than 10% of Wikipedia editors identify as...

This article demonstrates queer feminist media praxis as a framework for investigating digital articulations (Johnson and Simmons, 2015) of gender in social media by unpacking heteronormativity in social media; examining underlying epistemologies of procedural rhetoric and interface design that structure heteronormative identities; and performing a...

A companion text to a piece of online activist rhetoric, this essay attempts to explain how social media networks and other digital interfaces intercede and influence users' constructions of gender and consumer identity. Gaining awareness of the influence networks have over our lives, should empower users to appropriate and subvert those networks...

Research across disciplines in recent years has demonstrated a number of gains associated with community engagement and service-learning pedagogies. More recently, these pedagogies are filtering into digital contexts as instructors become aware of the opportunities for learning made available by online writing venues. This case study describes an a...

Readings on Writing is an edited collection of essays on writing compiled by the Ohio University English department composition committee and used in the common curriculum for English 202, Writing & Rhetoric I.

http://candcblog.org/mvetter/public_html/composingwithwikipedia/