Friday, November 13, 2009

Editing a Wikipedia Page

If an instructor told me to edit a page of Wikipedia, many things would be going through my head. First, I would wonder what topics I know a significant information about and could contribute to what was already written. As a college student, I feel that I lack the accumulated knowledge necessary to editing an encyclopedia that reaches millions of users around the world. Although anyone can technically change pages on Wikipedia, there is a certain personal responsibility users need to have. Most people that use Wikipedia use to to find information and not to shape that information for others to see. Those that do make edits, at least I hope, have expert knowledge on that subject area and provide an objective point of view.

That being said, if I had to edit a page of Wikipedia, I would probably pick something where I could find multiple sources to backup whatever changes I was making to the content. Out of my own self-interest, I might do something sports related, maybe a biography of an athlete. With multitudes of statistical information available online for sports, it would be relatively easy to locate an accurate piece of information that was not mentioned on an athlete's bio page. Regardless of whether I was sure of the information I was inputting, because I am not an expert on the subject, I would feel an inherent uneasiness about putting something online that anyone in the world could read and accept as a fact.

1 comment:

  1. Backing up an article with many sources is a very good idea. Since sports is virtually based on statistics and statistics for just about every facet of sports exist, wiki'ing a sport related article would be a good idea. I agree that you can easily fill-in the void of many sport athlete pages because I have personally wiki'ed many sport athletes and wondered about their past, which is not always present on a wiki page.

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