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In keeping with the topic of my blog for this class, I chose to edit the Forever 21 wiki page. Forever 21 is infamous for fast fashion so I thought it would be perfect to chose not only for that but also because it did seem like it was missing some important information. I usually am not one to make corrections or really speak out on mistakes using a platform like Wikipedia so I definitely stepped out of my comfort zone with this assignment.
I did find that using the Wikipedia Education Training, I felt more confident it making a change. I was able to essentially try out all of the sections of making an edit prior to actually making the change on a real page. One thing I loved about the training was how organized it was. It really walked you through each step in this process and showed you how to use all of the necessary tools to make edits. This helped to make the very daunting task of making a change a little less scary. I also loved that we basically got to start the assignment in the training session in the sense that we chose are articles and starting thinking about what to say about them.
After doing more research on Forever 21’s bankruptcy outside of the training session, I found out that they are currently in court to be sold for $81 million dollars to 3 different companies, something that is not up to date in the “Downfall Section” of the wiki page. Before making the changes to the page, I did check out the Talk page to see what was being discussed. I found that it seemed like there really was not anything being talked about but I did post my suggested edit to see if anyone would respond or have any other insight to add. In this image here, you can see my comment at the bottom of the page. I did update the date accessed because for some reason I wrote 2010 and not 2020 so the red portion went away.
After waiting about 2 days, I did not receive any type of feedback on my suggested edit. I decided to take this as an okay to make the change and so I did. From first looking at the talk page, it didn’t seem like anyone really used the talk page for this topic so I felt that I was okay to go ahead I checked my spelling and grammar about a million times before I actually hit publish changes. I will not lie, I was pretty nervous as I typed out my edit because I just was worried I would break wikipedia or something like that. In this image below you can see my edit that I wrote and then cited at the very bottom of this section. I found it to be so important to add because if someone were writing an article or a paper on the downfall of Forever 21, they should have an updated timeline of what is going on with the brand.
Even after having my edit on the page for a few days, there did not seem to be any feedback from it. I guess that either I did a good job or no one really cared to look. I think it is pretty cool that if you go to the Forever 21 page, you will see my edit and my work. All of the things that I learned from the training that we did helped me to be able to make my edit and format it properly. Without the training, I would definitely have been lost and even more worried then I already was about making this change on the page.
Although I was very nervous stepping out of my comfort zone to do something like this, I see how important it is to have the power to make changes and to correct things that might not be accurate. Websites like Wikipedia are so important because of how much information they provide. Wikipedia provides access to information for all people as long as they have a device that is able to get on the internet. Knowledge is power and site like Wikipedia gives that power to everyone.
I am really glad that this was an assignment for this class because I feel like everyone might have a fact or some information that could be really useful to Wikipedia. I know that I was so nervous about making the change but I just added a small fact. I thought to myself, imagine there was some sort of false information that needed to be changed, I shouldn’t be so nervous to correct that. With Wikipedia being a source of information for everyone, I would hope that it only could provide factual things. I really enjoyed this assignment even though it was definitely very out of my comfort zone!
