So after my reading week vacation it was time to hit the books again, and continue my social media exploration journey. This time around I have decided to explore the ever-changing world of Wikipedia. In case you don't know, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that can be editted and changed by the general populace and is therefore often considered to be an unreliable source of information for research. As unreliable as some people make it sound, I honestly use it as a starting point for many of my assignments and papers and, somewhat surprisingly, I have an immunology professor that uses Wikipedia to support many of his lectures.
Since the dawn of this famous method of disseminating information it has been well-publicized that anyone can edit anything on the website, but not as widely publicized is HOW you actually do this editting. Honestly, when I first approached the task, I was overwhelmed by the specific coding you have to use to make a single sentence look just the way you want it to. I don't know very much about computers or HTML, and before this task I was a simple "click the italics button in a Word document" type of computer user, but now I would say I am a WikiHTML pro. It is actually quite simple. There are only a few different coding phrases that you actually need to use such as <ref> for references and ==for a section header==. I still had to preview the wikipedia page after almost every sentence to ensure that it looked the way I wanted it to, but at the end I was proud of my work and felt like I could edit more Wikipedia pages in the future if I needed to.
The particular Wikipedia page I worked on was for the
Cacomistle, a type of ring-tailed cat found in Central America. Before this assignment all I knew about the Cacomistle is that it is a strange animal that a lot of people don't even know exists. It was really interesting looking up studies, and information on this elusive species and compiling it together into one document that people can use in the future as a resource. I added a brief overview on the Classification, Physical Description, Habitat and Range, Nutrition, and Reproduction in order to give readers a basic overview of the species. The intimidating thing is knowing that a lot of people will take the information I posted as total infallable fact, which I hope is true, but in reality because this species is so mysterious each source had slightly different numbers and descriptions.When creating my Wiki I tried to include primarily the facts that appeared to be universal across all my sources and avoided the ideas that were variable. Hopefully, if the information I posted turns out to be incorrect, another Wikipedia editor will come across it and fix any errors I made. In that way Wikipedia is excellent; it is unofficially being "peer-reviewed" by other users to double check facts and sources. Though at any one moment the information may not be 100% reliable, the overall quality of the information is excellent because it is always being checked and rechecked.
On of my classmates Lauren Bradshaw commented in her
blog, "What better way to build passion about a subject than bringing together a group
of people who share a common interest?". I think this is great way to look at using a Wiki. A group of people, who otherwise would not likely have met, have the opportunity to share ideas and delve deeper into common areas of interest. As well, since passion is often considered to be a contagious emotion, seeing the passion a group of people have for a particular topic could engage a unsuspecting bystander allowing the excitement to extend past the boundaries of the internet.
