Response #9: Wikipedia For Dummies

April 6, 2009 ambie321

wikipedia

Last week, I had the extreme pleasure (sarcasm) of editing a Wikipedia page for the first time. I’m not gonna lie…I really couldnt dream of anything I cared enough about to edit on Wikipedia (except, of course, myself) so it took me a while to get excited about this project. Ok…I’m lying…I never exactly got excited about this project…however i DID to my due diligence to learn all about Wikiland. I read the tutorial and figured out what it would take to not get my page snatched down..

I finally decided to edit my organization’s page. The National Association of Social Workers is my current place of employment. We have struggled significantly with getting a substantive Wikipedia entry, as every time we’ve posted our information to wikipedia it has been taken down. Alas…what a wonderful undertaking for me to explore for my Wikipedia report.

With the help of my wonderful colleague, I gathered all of the necessary information to make a dynamite entry on Wikipedia. After reading the existing entry and the information I had discovered during my research, I decided that I would add a section about National Professional Social Work Month. Check it out here. Considering the fact that Social Work Month has been my life’s purpose since October of last year, I thought this would be easy. BOY WAS I WRONG!.

Thanks to which ever genius that came up with Wikipedia code…it took me like an hour to update an entry about something that should’ve only taken 15 minutes. I spent about 45 minutes of my time trying to figure out how to link properly to the pages I was referencing. I’m still not convinced that I got it right…but at this point..I’m SO over it!

I think the technicality, time and consideration that it takes for a person to participate in Wiki-world completely takes away from the purpose of user generated media. As I stated earlier, there is really NOTHING in the world that I care enough about to spend the kind of time and energy it takes to make a valuable contribution to Wikipedia. If I could simply just edit the page with whatever I wanted and go on with my life…sure..I’d do it again. But after my experience last week…no thanks!

I’ll stick to other annoyingly complicated sites…such as the new facebook. *eye roll*