Contributing to Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a great source for free information on pretty much anything. For any Google search I do, a Wikipedia page is usually within the top 3 pages listed. The truly remarkable thing about Wikipedia is how all that quality content was created. It was created freely by people like you and me who wanted to contribute. There are millions of topics that still need to be written about in Wikipedia giving a perfect opportunity to contribute.

My instructor, Jess, for my Ales204 class asked the class to update a wiki stub. Stubs in Wikipedia are pages that have been started, have a small amount of information but need some work. Often these stubs have a great structure to them making editing them easy. All you have to do if find addition information for the topics presented. Some stubs, like the one I edited, lack that structure. These are often called substubs and according to wikipedia often contain incorrect information. These pages are much harder to edit because you must come up with all the content from scratch. I wouldn't consider the page I edited as sub page because it did have structure. However the structure and content were not of quality to build on.

Here is a picture of my Wikipedia page.


As you can see it looks like any other Wikipedia page.

The most difficult part of editing the wikipedia page for me was not the research or the writing; but rather a feeling like I wasn't qualified enough to write a Wikipedia page. At the beginning of the project I felt as though I had no knowledge that I could share. All the wikipedia pages seem so professional and advanced, containing many fine details that I didn't know. As I research how to edit Wikipedia article I came to realize that they are so advanced and perfect because of the effort of everyone. Even though my article isn't perfect someone else will come along and using my sources and new sources of their own will modify it to be a bit better. Then someone else will modify it and the trend will continue until it is a well polished gem. All that is needed by me is to get it past the first hump where the structure and majority of the information and some quality sources to guide others with.

Although the task of modifying an Wikipedia page was daunting at first it now seems like a simple task. An easy way that I can contribute to the WWW. Here are some links to my fellow classmates blogs if you would like to see their work. You can also find links to their blogs in the class's blogs comment sections.

http://yummyolanda.blogspot.com/
http://morandi-ales204.blogspot.com/2011/11/wiki-stub-born.html