For the past few weeks, despite the outbreak that happened, when I first began wikipedia, it was cool learning about the ins and outs of it. I never thought there would be a day where I would pick an article of my choosing to actually edit and add things too. I’m basically another editor that has the ability to put whatever I see fit (if it’s credible at least). That’s the first thing about wikipedia is that the editor can’t exactly add a load of rubbish, because this is also checked by other editors and wikipedia itself. In the article editing wikipedia we were shown the beginning stages of becoming wikipedia editors. In addition, we went over the policies of.
Wikipedia, which meant that this platform was just some lawless free for all, but at least a gateway source on a certain topic. Also, tangentially, I forgot to mention that we created wikipedia accounts as we needed this to become editors and I will later mention we had access to various training. As mentioned before, the article a couple sentences above, explained to us how to search for our article and we got to choose about three, to potentially choose just one to edit. Which helps mention our first training, which was how to find our articles. So in addition to the editing wikipedia tips and tricks, it came in handy when doing the first training. We basically searched topics that go along with our interest or we used stub articles. Stub articles are articles that aren’t exactly fitting certain requirements to make it an accurate article. This made it easier because those are the main articles we were looking to edit.
At first it was a rough start for me because I tried to keep my topic of interest and look for anime related articles. I began trying to do an article on a japanese voice actor Masami Iwasaki (his wiki article: Masami). As you can see this article had mostly everything missing. This man was a mystery besides showing a layout of all the voice over he had done. Which is great information, but what about his personal life, any awards, or accolades. I understand that he may have not been a well known voice actor, but they are people who can become extremely famous just as a normal on screen actor can. Now using the training modules that we were practicing, I made sure if there was any other important info missing and this was just an article that really needed editing. I tried searching for various articles relating to this person and their life. Ran into a wall full of the same info on the wiki page itself. So I had to go back to stub articles and I finally found something that was actually capable of editing.
It was an article about an american sign language poet named Clayton Valli. First of all I never heard of this kind of poet at all, so it was cool to know about. The first thing I noticed about this article, is that it needed something as simple as a profile pic for him, which was pretty easy to find. And a huge part or chunk that was missing was verifying citations from previous editors.
None of the editors verified their sources that they had found on him and that was labeled at the top of the wiki article. So as I said before, I had a path to go on and I would definitely find more articles and verify them as a citation. And include my sources in the references as well to make them relevant and have proof. Overall, I learned a lot about wikipedia and how useful these articles can actually be. I want to appreciate my professor for adjusting the crisis and making it possible to continue learning and improving.
