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The Experience with and within Wikipedia

In this blog post, I am going to tell you my experiences with Wikipedia, which I made in the last three months due to my participation in the university course “Constructing Knowledge in the Digital Age: Wikipedia´s Contribution to the Humanities”.

My Article

I wrote a new Wikipedia article about Mary Rowlandson´s captivity narrative. Unfortunately, I had to write in German because the English article was already quite detailed. My article is therefore titled “Die wahre Geschichte der Gefangenschaft und Befreiung der Mrs. Mary Rowlandson“. Continue reading “The Experience with and within Wikipedia”

Experiencing Wikipedia

In this post I´m blogging about my experiences on contributing my first Wikipedia article.

For the University Seminar on `Constructing Knowledge in the Digital Age: Wikipedia´s Contribution to the Humanities´ I have written a WP article about the dystopian short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut in German language which is named Harrison Bergeron (Kurzgeschichte) on Wikipedia. The student´s task for the seminar was to create a complete new article or to complement an already existing article that deals somehow with topics of literature or social sciences. I´ve chosen to create a WP article about the short story because I read it recently and was fascinated on how Vonnegut displays the theme of totalitarianism, and the manipulation of society by a fictional government. Besides that there already existed articles about `Harrison Bergeron´ in English, French, Spanish and Russian but not in German. So this theme fitted perfectly to the assignment – I was about to create a WP article about a literary work with social and political background which wasn´t existing yet in my mother language. Continue reading “Experiencing Wikipedia”

My First Wikipedia Article – “Behind the Scenes”

I’ve always used Wikipedia a lot (who doesn’t?) but I’ve never thought about writing my own article. However, I decided to attend a course called Constructing Knowledge in the Digital Age: Wikipedia’s Contribution to the Humanities this semester. Not knowing what this course would actually look like I considered it more innovative than the typical “Shakespeare classes” and I told myself: Try it! First of all I had to realize that I actually knew nothing about the encyclopedia that felt so familiar and furthermore the question if I’ll ever write an article for Wikipedia was answered for me: I will. Continue reading “My First Wikipedia Article – “Behind the Scenes””

How to be a Wikipedia Author

When I found out that I was supposed to write my own Wikipedia article in class, I was surprised and a little worried. I had heard from every professor that Wikipedia was not a reliable source for writing a research paper. However, who does not use it to get a first overview on any topic? I expected it to be quite complicated to write an article myself that would actually get published.
Continue reading “How to be a Wikipedia Author”

Editing Wikipedia – What’s this all about?

“There’s enough editors for this, aren’t there?”

Wikipedia is a knowledge database maintained by its users, normal people like you and me. Not just researchers and scientists contribute to the never-ending catalogue of wisdom, everyone can, but not everyone does.

I’ll be the first to admit I stumbled into editing on Wikipedia by accident. What made me start doing it was a course at the University of Stuttgart, the course which this whole blog is structured by. I originally did not consider this course for myself, but due to another course being cancelled, I found myself attending nonetheless. It was a spontaneous decision, but not one I regret. Continue reading “Editing Wikipedia – What’s this all about?”

Accepting the Challenge “Wikipedia”

Finding a Topic

I decided to expand an existing article which was a biography of a German musician, named Rolf Zuckowski. He had a two-line entry in the English Wikipedia. The article falls under the category Biography of Living Persons and was rated as “stub-class” on the project’s quality scale (in March 2012) and of low importance for the English speaking world. An article that is rated as stub-class is a

very basic description of the topic [because] it is either a very short article or a rough collection of information that will need much work to become a meaningful article.”1

Continue reading “Accepting the Challenge “Wikipedia””

  1. WikiProject article quality grading scheme []