The Wikipedia assignment, what can I say about this. When I am looking up information on my own, for class or personal use, I never use Wikipedia. It can be manipulated way too easily. This assignment just proves it to me. I’m going to be completely honest here, I briefly considered not even completing the assignment. Not because I didn’t want to put in the work, that I don’t mind at all, just because I will never use this information again.
This was an interesting experience and it was difficult. It was hard, first of all, to find an article to edit. And the editing wasn’t a picnic, though what I did was small, so it wasn’t too bad. I just added a link. The last I checked, the link I added was still there so I’m counting this as a win! The entire process does give me a newfound appreciation for all of the work that goes into these articles. Even when they’re edited as a joke, it takes time and effort. Not only on the part of the prankster making the initial edit, but then someone comes along behind them to clean up their mess. All of the training modules that we completed really helped in the process, otherwise I would have been completely lost. I found the sandbox to be a bit confusing, but the talk page and the actual edit wasn’t too bad.
It wasn’t as bad as I first feared that it would be, but I will not do it again unless forced. This isn’t my cup of tea to be quite honest and I will most likely never do it again. I may start using Wikipedia more as a starting point, to get ideas articles. Even as a way to fact check, but only on well developed articles that I can cross reference.
