When finding information for a research project or even information on something that I find interesting I generally look at Wikipedia first. This usually happens because it is the first link that shows up when I Google something. I also use Wikipedia first because I know that the information that is listed in the various articles will be well organized and easy to understand.
To begin with I thought that project 1 would be a piece of cake. How hard could it be to find some sources and write some words on a new topic? I ended up finding that this project was harder than I anticipated but the whole process ended up being kind of fun.
I started off local and discovered that Fox Lake near my house was not on Wikipedia. This seemed like an amazing topic at the time and I dove into finding resources for information on the lake. To begin with I found lots of information and quickly put together a draft of an article. Using the code from Stroud’s Run state park my article looked pretty good.
After using all the information that I could get from a State of Ohio website I realized that that was all the information that was out there on the lake. All the other websites had taken information of the State of Ohio website, sometimes word for word, and used it in their webpages about the lake.
This became a roadblock. I only had 350 words and no more information that I could find on the lake. I tried my hardest to search for more information but came up with nothing. There just wasn’t enough going on at this location for anyone to write anything new or unique. I knew that something had to be done and with just a few days before the due date I changed topics.
Although I had some of the same problems with finding unique information on different websites, I was able to find much more information on my new topic, Camp Akita. Because it was a better-known place there was even a Columbus Dispatch article about it.
Once I began to write I found this article a lot easier to write. Because I knew a lot about Camp Akita I was able to add a bit to the information provided and was able to make sure that anyone that read my article would understand the information and get a feel for the camp.
At the end it seemed like a mad dash to get the article done. I was able to write the article quickly but getting all the code put together and making sure that when it was posted that it looked good took time. I didn’t originally anticipate that putting in all the code and links would take so much time so I felt hurried in the end.
It was nice that we had lab time towards the due date so that we could talk to our classmates and ask them questions about code and layout that they had already figured out. That was a huge help and made my page look a lot better and flow really well.
My article is still up and it does not seem like it will be taken down in the near future. I thought that this was a very worthwhile project. I have never worked on a paper like this and I think it helped open my eyes to a different world of information. I was always told that Wikipedia is unreliable and I believed it but now I feel different about the website. I am now able to trust the information that I find on it and although I do not think I will be listing it as a reference for an academic paper I will definitely use it in my daily research as a reliable source.
I definitely learned how to better summarize information by doing this project. This project helped me to take the information that I was reading on various websites and put it together into one coherent document. I really had to focus on the information that I was reading and change it so that it was in my own words without merely copying word for word from my sources.
I didn’t do much quoting in this piece of writing but I did think hard about where direct quotes would go. I also made sure that I wasn’t using too much quoted information because I wanted the article to be in my voice and not the voice of the writers that wrote the references that I used.
The book Writing About Writing says that tone is “a reader’s judgment of what a text sounds like, sometimes also termed the dominant mood of a text” (733). I wanted to make sure that when I was writing this article that I had a grip on my tone. I wanted to make sure that my tone was kept very informative without sounding boring or like a lecture.
I learned even more that writing is intertextual or that “texts are made up of other texts” (WAW 726). In order to write this article I had to take information from other places. I did rewrite the information and make it mine as much as I could but really there is no way to truly do that when writing a research piece.
Wikipedia is changing information and the way that we receive it. You can type just about anything into Google and the 1st website that comes up is almost always Wikipedia. I don’t think there are any other websites that can claim that. This makes Wikipedia accessible to anyone that has the internet.
Because Wikipedia is free, anyone can use it. If you were to buy a printed encyclopedia such as Britannica, you could end up spending hundreds of dollars on something is practically the same as the free Wikipedia. I think that having Wikipedia is a huge advantage for everyone, not only students. Wikipedia makes information available to the masses that in the past would have only been available to academics or those with access to libraries that carried encyclopedias.
I know that professors tend to look down upon Wikipedia but I believe they do this because they do not know that Wikipedia is just as reliable as Britannica. Both encyclopedias have mistakes including actual errors, omissions and misleading statements. When it comes to numbers they are almost the same. “All told, Wikipedia had 162 such problems, while Britannica had 123. That averages out to 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia” (cnet).
Wikipedia makes it possible for everyone to add to their knowledge of the world. It provides a very accessible place for people to not only receive new information but also share the information that they have.
I truly enjoyed writing this article and plan on checking on it periodically to make sure that it is still posted on Wikipedia and to see if anyone has edited it. As new information comes in I plan on adding to my article to make sure that it is always up to date and correct. Although this projects was more complicated than I originally anticipated I am glad that I got the opportunity to write for such an amazing database. I hope that other people will be able to learn how valuable Wikipedia is.
References:
Wardle, Elizabeth, and Doug Downs. Writing About Writing: A College Reader. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. Print. Terdiman, Daniel. “Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica.” Cnet News. CBS Interactive, 2011. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1038_3-5997332.html
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