Wikipedia. The largest online encyclopedia with countless articles in a quantity of languages. How can one find an article that does not exist already? As you can see the first task our instructor, Miss Baillot, gave us was already the most difficult one. It certainly took quite a while to find an appropriate article to write. I chose to write a completely new article about “My Son the Fanatic” by Hanif Kureishi on the German Wikipedia platform. Continue reading “Wikipedia and Me”
Becoming part of the Wikipedia family
Writing my first own Wikipedia article
First Thoughts and Preparation
When it came to writing my first Wikipedia article, the first question was the subject it should be about. Our requirement was to choose a topic which had to be relevant, liberal arts oriented and there had to be enough literature about it. That led me to check the core principles of Wikipedia again, where notability and verifiability are two important points. For my article I chose the theme of a seminar paper I wrote a semester before, which is a poem of the famous German poet Eduard Mörike: “Der alte Turmhahn”. Due to the German content, I wrote my article in German. Checking the relevance, I had a look at the parent page of Eduard Mörike, where the most important works are listed. “Der alte Turmhahn” was mentioned but not further described and therefore I wanted to fill this gap. To verify my words I needed both primary and secondary literature.
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””
My first Wikipedia article “Pornography”
It was the time to choose a new course for the winter term 2014-2015. Among different courses I noticed a “Constructing Knowledge in the Digital Age: Wikipedia’s Contribution to the Humanities”. It sounded really interesting because until this time I was only a passive contributor of Wikipedia. In my opinion Wikipedia is one of the best resources where you can find an overview about almost everything.