I can make a Wikipedia?!?!

Wikipedia is a type of online encyclopedia. The main difference being that it is online and written by regular people. Generally the information is very informative and accurate but this is not a totally reliable source of information. Although, it is a great stepping stone to expand your research. It is Wikipedia's policy to have all the information used cited properly so it is easy to find the actual source of the information. Being such a computerized age it is important to have a website like this, all the information one can imagine is but a few finger strokes away and anyone being allowed to contribute to the mass of information. This also makes the site very unreliable. It can also be difficult to to edit an article because someone else may be trying to edit the same one, resulting in an "edit war" causing the information to be very unstable and ever changing.

I have recently made a contribution to the world of Wikipedia by editing and adding information to a stub about a tree, Asian Bayberry. Adding to a stub is the best idea because they are already connected to other pages, making it more likely that your page will be visited. At first I was very nervous about adding my own informative post into the world of Wiki. I always thought of it containing long list of computer code and that I am not knowledgeable enough to post about something for everyone to see. In reality a person like me or my classmate, Mark, are the perfect people to write a Wikipedia post. We have access to reliable peer reviewed articles and journals with the most recent information and we are passionate about our field of interest, which we love to share with many people. As for the series of code that makes editing your stub look like a mess of lines and words, it isn't as bad as I thought. These pages can be as simple or complex as one desires.  If I did happen to run into problems, which I did, there is a very informative help page that organizes everything into related, easy to read sections. As for me, once I found out how to use the proper citation name I was on a roll!

This is a great activity to make me realize that Wikipedia is not as reliable as I originally anticipated. I need to look at websites closer to ensure that they are peer reviewed and that the information may not be accurate. Wikipedia is a good first step to gain an understanding about the subject that you are looking into and to continue research using the references provided.