Saturday, March 19, 2011

Practicum 2 - Eric

As a registered user on Wikipedia, I am now following 28 articles to watch the changes within them. Within 1 hour I have seen almost a dozen edits to these pages. I never realized (nor could I have even known before I became a user) how often these pages get edited. Many of them seem like simple little grammatical fixes, but some are substantial edits (such as almost anything on Obama's page). It's really interesting to view the history of the edits and the discussions taking place about future changes. I also learned that pages have a certain protection status, so to move up in the hierarchy of editing pages, I first need to edit 10 and be a member for 4 days. I'm currently working on moving up in status and looking for other Wiki sites.

4 comments:

  1. In high school my history teacher dedicated an entire class to showing us how easy it is to alter a wikipedia page in hopes of deterring students from using it as any kind of "reliable" source for papers or projects. Even though I have been exposed to this, I still find my self typing in "x wiki" into google if I need fast info on some topic.

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  2. I agree with Madeleine, if I need fast information on a topic the first place I usually look is Wikipedia. I think it is crazy that what we read on a Wikipedia page could be gone tomorrow, or even in an hour. I did notice that some Wikipedia pages have a pad lock icon in the corner so that page can not be edited. I wonder why some pages have this feature but not others.

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  3. In the third paragraph of this article: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2010/tc20100218_199388.htm Google has a quick blurb about Wikipedia, saying they have "a large amount of particularly high-quality content, gets linked to a lot, [etc.]" and a Wiki editor says that "pages at Wikipedia 'suck less than most of the Web.'" While Wikipedia may not be an academic source (due to its constant updating by anybody) I think it really is largely correct, especially compared to other online articles.

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  4. I had no idea Wikis were edited all the time.. I guess I should have figured the community was more active since people will take the time and effort to write four paragraphs just stating their opinions, why not take time to edit/post information that actually matters..

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