How much do I use Wikipedia? I use it every day. When I want learn about something or someone, need to find some basic research, take a sneak peak at a plot of a movie or book, or am just plain bored, I go straight to Wikipedia. The placement of Wikipedia is also very smart. When you google a person or an event, a Wikipedia page is one of the first to pop up. For example, when I was googling Lisa Kudrow, her Wikipedia page was the very first link. According to the article “Know it All” by Stacy Schiff from The New Yorker, it claims that “Wikipedia can aspire to be all-inclusive.” This states that Wikipedia has articles on everything; such as baseball, American Idol, George Clooney and other celebrities, and world events such as Japan’s Tsunami. Furthermore, “anyone with internet access can create a Wikipedia entry or edit an existing one.” This has created problems because there are many false facts, errors, or obscenities on Wikipedia. Therefore, as the numbers of users increase so too does vandalism. Many believe that Wikipedia should have stronger surveillance and editorial oversight. I agree with stronger editorial oversight because while reading about something, I want all the facts to be 100% correct with correct grammar.
Recently, I have signed up for a Wikipedia account. My project was to look for articles of topics that I know something about and make edits to these pages, such as correcting the spelling, grammar, or to provide new information. As I was cruising around Wikipedia, it was actually difficult to think of articles that I could fix or improve. I did searches on celebrities but you are unable to edit any information in order to protect their information. There have been occasions when a celebrities’ information had been tampered with. For example, Miley Cyrus’s Wikipedia page said that she had died and claimed that Justin Timberlake had lost his home for failing to pay federal taxes.
In the end I settled with the “Miracle on Ice” Wiki page. I chose this because I am an avid hockey fan and I did a project on this Olympic event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_ice.
There are thousands of changes made to a Wiki page, so it was difficult to find any mistakes. However, I did add extra detail in the ‘Soviet and American teams’ and ‘Preparing for Gold Medal Round’ section. Someone had written that the Soviet players were “amateurs” which was entirely untrue. I had changed that to “professional adults.” I also included how Herb Brooks’ goal was to build up stamina for his players in order to keep up with the Soviets through all three periods. These were the major changes I made. The rest were minimal, such as adding commas.
Using and editing Wikipedia was not at all difficult. It all depends on how much you know and which sites can be edited.
The link above presents a youtube step-by-step tutorial on how to create your own Wikipedia article.
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