Wiki 5-fact check in practice

II) 

The article I chose is the Wikipedia page of “Twitterature.” The sources for this page were mostly articles from other trusted sources, such as The New Yorker, and The New York Times blog. I feel like the sources are not necessarily reliable, because they include personal blogs, meaning lots of bias and opinions, as well as an entry from Urban Dictionary. Urban Dictionary does translate “slang” terms, but a lot of times it is a bit profane, and it exaggerated. I trust the sources from the New Yorker and New York Times. Those are both well-respected publications and reliable.

After doing the 5-fact check, the five that I checked were reported thoroughly and correctly.  It includes the different genres of Twitterature, such as Twitter novels, literary classics retold, collaborative works, and fan fiction. These were all stated in the sources.

I think the information is generally reliable. Since the term in the article, “Twitterature,” is a slang term, and new to this generation, we must assume the the blogs and other sources are correct, since it is probably the only information available about this new term. It is not a historical event or person, which would have much more factual information available. This kind of thing is a bit subjective, as since it is new and was born with the ride of social media, a set-in-stone definition for it has not yet been decided on or achieved.

There is not much detail, simply because of the fact that, like I said, it is a new term. There is not yet much to work with or many examples to give. However, even so, the article goes into the different forms of Twitterature, a bit of the history, and even some examples. In this particular case, the lack of details does not translate into lack of reliability. There is simply not enough information out or fully established yet for the article to be super-detailed. 

Analysis

Wikipedia has always been fascinating to me. This is mostly because I've grown up being told that Wikipedia is not reliable and that one should never use it in a research paper, but if I am being honest, Wikipedia has not failed me once. The information I find is always precise, complete and elaborate, withe even more details than I was originally searching for. However, after Part 1 of this short assignment, I've began to understand where my teachers were coming from. Although Wikipedia does only accept information from "reliable" sources, their definition of "reliable" is loose. Blogs fall under the "reliable" category just because the speaker has prior knowledge, but sometimes, prior knowledge is not enough to produce a reliable, encyclopedia-worthy entry on a certain subject. 

In Handa's The Multimediated Rhetoric of the Internet, she talks about how the internet has affected culture, and this concept was visible in my choice of article: Twitterature. "Twitterature" is a new form of literature that has come about because of the ways the Internet has influences out culture. This can be tied into kairos, and Kilingsworth's Appeals to Time. My specific Wikipedia entry is time-dependent. A few years back, Twitterature was not "a thing," and in a few years, it might not be "a thing" again. Right now is when it is, and an appeal to time in this case is very time-sensitive and appropriate.