This week’s virtual trip to Wikipedia got me thinking a lot about the inner working of a community based website and can’t help but to ask myself how reliable of information that is so easily publish by anonymous authors/editors.  How does the anonymous crowd ensure the site does not get overrun by saboteurs and vandals?

My first experience of signing up and going through the tutorial in Wikipedia was very straight forward. The first thing that caught my attention is that the email field was made optional and there are minimal data fields that are required for signing up. This looks strange to me as this is probably the only site I have ever been to that didn’t try to collect as much individually identifiable information as possible from me. Generally I would spend upward of 20 minutes just to go through the registration page but with wikipedia it had only taken me 5 minutes. So right off the bat I can see the huge focus in keeping contributors anonymous by default which is opposite to many online services out there.

Going through the tutorial is simple enough for those of us computer literates. The page editor interface is clean and intuitive.  Aside from learning the use of special tags such as the <references/> in building up the page, many of basic formatting and features can be control via menu at the top of the editor control. Once I tried out a few things at the sandbox page I am well on my way to do it in the production mode. I first went through some of the wiki pages recommended and see what I want to add/change. Then I realized our week 6 topic “Social Mobile Application” does not have a page yet and certainly deserve to have one in the wiki universe.  So I searched around in wikipedia to make sure no similar page has already been created and go ahead to create one. The creation of a new page is easy, you can control all of the common functions from the tab portion of the page such as edit and create page.

The page was created last night and it is still available as of right now. So my overall experience has been a very positive one. I guess my selected topic isn’t a contentious one and that’s why it hasn’t been taken away.

Part 1 can be found at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/pg/blog/read/74730/week-8-wikipedia-adventure-part-1-of-2

Dickson