Practicum - Logan (1)

I had a bit of down time, so I decided to get to work on the practicum assignment. I was assigned 'Wiki Participation', and I am excited to fully explore the Wiki platform. Wikis (the fundamental tool enabling Wikipedia to be a "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit") are platforms that allow for collective editing of documents and other multimedia (photos, audios, videos, etc.). This means that anyone from around the world who has access to an Internet connection can write, edit, cite, and interpret information about a near-infinite set of HTML links and multimedia content.

Now, you may be asking, "What is to stop tweens or trolls (those who "troll the internet" purposely adding misinformation or off-topic subjects to topics unrelated to what is posted) from ruining credible and sound information?" The way that Wikipedia and other wiki sites maintain credibility is through constant fact-checking and monitoring of the information that constantly flows through their site. For instance, if I were to edit the Wikipedia page for 'basketball' and write that "basketball was invented by African martians", a moderator (employees that maintain the site) would see this post and quickly remove my addition. They may also record my IP address (essentially my computer's unique serial number) and ban postings from that computer if repetitive malicious or nonfactual information were to be posted. So, when you hear people say that Wikipedia has unreliable or random information posted by strangers, they neglect to understand that these sites are rigorously watched and corrected to ensure that factual information remains while the bogus or unrelated information is discarded.

I decided to begin by creating an account on Wikipedia to see how creating an account would enable personalization on a site that thrives on anonymity. I simply had to read their protocols on acceptable posting and usernames, and I was off. I decided on lallen6 just to make things easier. I posted a screenshot to show you what happens. I noticed one interesting feature about creating a username - I did not have to enter an email address. This was almost shocking to me because any other time I have registered to be a member of any site, I was required to present a valid email.

Beyond that, I just poked around for about an hour on the 'Wiki' entry on 'Wikipedia' and get a basic understanding of how and why these sites function. More to come!