reflections

Alex Douglas

In the past 10 years there has been no bigger influence on my knowledge than Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit and it contains articles and information that other encyclopedias may not have. The main strength of Wikipedia, its ease of editing, is also its main controversy. I recently have had the experience of editing and adding to a Wikipedia article.

When I was trying to decide what article I should edit it was recommended that I do an article on something relevant to my major so I could put it on my resume, so I chose Vodafone UK, a telecommunications company. This is where Wikipedia's free editing is a shortcoming. Anyone can change my article. They could reword sections, add new information, or even cut out sections. This could be problematic, as in a few years what my employer sees may or may not be my original writing. This kind of editing brings up Poters' concept of intertextuality. As Writing About Writing puts it, “intertextuality is the idea that all texts contain “traces” of other texts and that there can be no text that does not draw on some ideas form other texts.” (86) This means that just as someone who edits my article is borrowing from my text, what I wrote is based on someone elses' work. I believe that this infers that even if someone were to change parts of my work, it would still remain partially mine, as my work was the starting point.

As I started to write my article I found that finding information that meets Wikipedia's credibility standards. The little information that I did find was hard to put into the article without making it look like it was directly copied. I then found that there was too little information about Vodafone, so I began looking for a new article.

To find a new article I had to go threw the stubs and start class articles to find one that I could edit successfully. I ran into a few problems at this juncture. I found that many of the start class articles were too developed for me to add new information conversely, almost all of the stub class articles were empty. After a few hours of searching I was able to find an article that I could relate to, The Dublin Irish Festival, a annul festival that takes place in my home town.

Finding information about the Irish Festival was not as hard as for the Vodafone article. I was able to find a few news articles about awards the Festival had won and I was also able to find good information on their own website. Using this information I was able to put it into my own words and add a few sections to the article.

The actual editing of Wikipedia was pretty straight forward. There were a few codes you had to know to link articles or cite references but they were easy to learn and implement. The only trouble I had was that I didn't like the font that you have to edit in, but that's a fairly minor complaint.

In the end I found that Wikipedia is a great resource and encyclopedia. I learned a lot from my editing experience and I believe that I will edit an article in the future.