Our most recent assignment as an Ales 204 student was to add content to a Wikipedia entry or a stub. Before class I had no idea what a stub even was, and in case you were wondering too it’s a short article that needs to be expanded on. Now being that there were thousands, maybe even millions of stubs on Wikipedia I found it very hard to decide which one to pick to expand. Naturally I love sports so I leaned more towards something I knew, and that would give me more of an advantage to write about - but something that would also to keep me interested. After about three hours of searching and procrastinating which stub to choose I finally decided on the one stub that I kept coming back to – the Lethbridge Black Diamonds. In case you don’t know what the Lethbridge Black Diamonds are, they are a minor league baseball team in Lethbridge, Alberta, that was a farm team to the Arizona Diamondbacks. If you want to learn more I recommend you check out the page I edited to give you some more insight at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethbridge_Black_Diamonds .
Now editing a Wiki stub is definitely not as easy as I thought it would be because you have to learn the language of Wiki markup. And when you edit the article you’re not just writing sentences but in the sentences you add references, and all sorts of symbols to make the letter bold, or give a title to the work, or even to add bullets. Here’s a picture of what the article looks like on Wikipedia:
This is a picture of what the article looks like with references included, symbols that gave it title and make the font bold - this is the edit verson of what you see on Wikipedia:
I never knew such work went into making these sorts of articles. There is also a certain format to make charts and add pictures – which I never could figure out to add an image so eventually I just gave up the idea of adding an image.
In the end I actually didn’t mind doing this assignment but I think it was mostly because of the pride I felt to have something I had done on the internet – better yet Wikipedia. Also, the skills that I learned editing and adding text to the article is something that will be useful in the future for making websites or maybe editing more Wikipedia articles.
Looking at some of my fellow classmates blogs it was actually reassuring that some had had some problems along the way as well but that they felt they contributed to the internet too – like Karissa. I also really like the layout of Karissa’s blog the way she inserted the pictures in-between the text which makes it look really good visually.
