Thursday, October 7, 2010

Practicum blog 1

About a week ago, I created my account on Wikipedia. Today, I finished reading through the tutorial and got my first taste of how to edit wikipedia articles. Initially after going through the tutorial, I intended to edit an article but I found this significantly harder than I had originally planned. Particularly, I was not really sure where to start or what article to edit. Wikipedia covers such a broad variety of topics and as I quickly discovered, accurately and precisely covers these topics. I was somewhat discouraged that some of the articles I found most interesting covered above and beyond my knowledge of the topics. I did however quickly discover how to add pages to my "watchlist" which allows me to follow the modification of pages that interest me. After some brainstorming, I decided to edit the plot of the upcoming movie "It's Kind of a Funny Story". I had read a review of the plot on MTV's website and used this to update Wikipedia's site.

One of the things I found surprising was that there was a certain amount of code that you were required to understand in order to edit the wikipedia page. Without this information, you could not correctly site sources and your changes would not modified within the page.

Overall, I think editing my first page went well, the final result of navigating to the page and seeing my changes approved was awesome! Although it made me question the validity of things that I read on wikipedia.

No comments:

Post a Comment