WIKI WHAT WIKIPEDIA!

Editing my first Wikipedia page was a truly inspiring experience. To have the power to literally change a historical document was absolutely empowering and also alarming.  Stacy Schiff the author of The New York article entitled “Know It All” talks about the growth of this new source of information at a remarkable speed. She notes that in a 24 hr period that a one line article on a train station was edited and added to over 400 times. Proving that Wikipedia is not you parents static Encyclopedia. Schiff says, Because there are no physical limits on its size, Wikipedia can aspire to be all-inclusive. Wikipedia is sounds like a perfect wealth of knowledge. However it is tricky to believe everything on it.

For instance, a classmate of mine while editing the page she picked on Wikipedia on bicycles threw a short sentence “Chelsea loves bicycling” though it is a true statement it is not relevant at all to the article. It was up for 15 mins before senior editor took it down. However in those 15 mins I wonder how many people read that article and were influenced by her statement. What if this had been a complete and utter lie and not just a simple statement in that 15 min window people could have read and believed a lie. So it’s a possibility that not everything is absolutely factual when you read it.JENNY PACKHAM FALL 2010
However with that aside I edited the article on Modeling. I changed just normal punctuation errors and some sentence wording. The sentence I changed was “The first person described as a fashion model is Paris, Marie Vernet Worth” to “The first person described as a fashion model in Paris was Marie Vernet Worth.” I also hyperlinked Maria Vernet Worth to her husbands Wikipedia page because she didn’t have a page herself. Once I was on his page I realized that she was not listed as his wife in his biography stats section to the right hand side. Therefore I entered her in as his spouse.

This homework was really interesting and insightful. It taught me how to edit for the future when I find an error in a Wikipedia article. I will use this newfound knowledge for editing goodness. Until next time try editing out loud instead of blogging and help Wikipedia become perfect!