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Wikipedia and Me

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”

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”