Reflecting on Wikipedia

Before a pandemic began spreading across the world, completely altering pretty much everyone's plans for the foreseeable future, the third unit of my Writing for Digital Media class was about Wikipedia. And in the spirit of both current events and the class topic at hand, here's a link to the Wikipedia article on COVID-19 (see how I tied that together... pretty good, huh?). In this Wikipedia unit, we primarily focused on how articles are edited. We also spent some time learning how to evaluate the quality of an article. 

We did learn a little bit of background info about Wikipedia before we got to the editing. One thing we learned was that Wikipedia has like 5 million articles on it (and more get added regularly). That's a crazy big number! It's kind of wild to think that there is sooo much publicly available information on Wikipedia-- but I guess it is the free encyclopedia. 

In school growing up, teachers routinely said that Wikipedia wasn't a reputable source because anyone can edit it. After engaging in the editing process and learning about it, I've learned that while anyone can make edits to Wikipedia, those edits are almost always heavily monitored and reviewed. On top of that, they require citations. There are some strict procedures in place to make sure that articles are of high quality. 

Here's a list of some of the major criteria for Wikipedia articles:

• Articles should be written from a neutral perspective, no personal bias. 
• There should be no original research, opinions, or ideas. None of your own conclusions and interpretations should be included in articles, just the facts. 
• Absolutely no plagiarism. Changing a couple words but keeping the structure of a sentence is still plagiarism. Short, clearly marked quotes are okay. 
• Citations must be provided for the included information, and those sources should be reliable. 

When we were selecting our article to edit for this unit, we were encouraged to pick a stub or class-c article in an area that we were knowledgeable of. If we picked something more well-developed, we could more easily run into the issue of not having anything substantial to add to the article. Plus, articles that are more popular or that have had more work put into them usually have a larger number of people already keeping an eye on and improving them. 

Originally, I picked a class-c article about Mark Zug, an illustrator who has done some artwork for Magic: The Gathering, one of my favorite card games. I couldn't find any sources to use to add more info to the article, though, so I scrapped that idea because of the time frame we were working on. Then I picked the article for stamp sands, course sand left over from stamp mills. I like geology, I went on a trip to Michigan last summer where I actually got to see and learn about some stamp sands, and there were a couple articles including info on them available through PittCat, so it seemed like a winner. 

Plus, we learned that articles can fall under different categories based on how complete they are. For example, an article that is just a couple of sentences without many or any citations will likely fall under the "stub" category, indicating that it needs some additional work to be considered a reputable article. Another category that we looked at is class-c. Class-c articles are more substantial than stubs and often have some good sources, but they still require some work. This work is usually either adding more information, adding more sources, or cleaning up existing material within the article. 


Alas, that pandemic I was talking about earlier came along and cut Unit 3 short by forcing all UPJ classes to go online. So, here I am at my house, wrapping up this article and getting ready for whatever comes next. And this has nothing to do with Unit 3, but let me tell ya, it is really hard to focus on school work at home. At least now I know how to edit Wikipedia articles in my free time. 😅