Friday, November 11, 2011

Wiki Stub-born

Quite recently I'd spent a good couple hours updating a wiki stub article on the topic of folk medicine. Being that I've always had an interest in this topic I felt that it would be the best topic to research. However I found that finding trust worthy information was a tough task being that many articles related to the topic were not open source articles or else the content of the articles was very narrow and talked only about specific chemicals found in products used in folk medicine. This lack of information forced me to look towards secondary sources that may not be as reliable as primary source journal articles.The best article I had managed to find was a sociology article about how folk medicine is slowly gaining popularity in Western culture and why.

I had previous attempted updating other stub articles in their data base but was unsuccessful in either finding new information or any information at all for some of them. After so many failed attempts I definitely felt discouraged and having had a bit of success with the folk medicine route, refused to change paths.

At one point I had actually seen stub-sub articles about two of my friends who had competed in the 2010 winter Olympics. However I knew that I would not have gotten the same learning experience out of asking them for information over doing extensive research to complete a stub article that more people may be interested in. Although I'd found it quite hilarious to see their names on the Wikipedia database and will definitely make a point of asking if they know who started the stubs.

Screen shot of the editing box for folk medicine

Fortunately enough I didn't find the Wikipedia coding to be too tough. I guess having previous experience with other forms of coding online made it a lot simpler for me because after reading the blogs of other students in my class there seemed to be a bit of an issue with coding. One of my many classmates who participated in this assignment was Julie and she edited a stub about rainscald. Which fortunately she figure out the coding in the end because he article turned out well!

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