Wacky Wikipedia

When my English professor first told my class that we would be creating a Wikipedia article during the semester, I honestly did not think it would be that difficult. Just type a few hundred words about a topic that I know something about and be done with it. Simple is cake, right? WRONG.

In my attempt to find a topic not on Wikipedia was nearly impossible. In fact, I gave up my search and decided to expand a stub. My new goal became to find out what category I was going to look for my stub under. Dr. Hara said to write about something we know about and have a passion for, so I stuck with United States History.

Needless to say, it was not the most specific category to choose, as there were over five hundred stubs to choose from. So here started the random picking process. I would choose a stub that sounded remotely interesting and see how much had been written about it. Then, if the topic sounded like something I could write about, I googled it to see how many credible resources I could find on the topic.

I ended up deciding to expand the stub of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. It only had about two sentences on the stub and a plethora of resources to extract information from. So I put it aside until about three days before it was due. As I started to really dive into the references, EVERY SINGLE REFERENCE seem to state the EXACT same information as the previous one. Obviously, I was irritated beyond belief. How could writing one little article be so difficult?

So I took a deep breath and dived back in. I started noticing other pieces of history that the National Anti-Slavery Standard was woven into. A key abolitionist, Frederick Douglass was published in the paper several times, as well as one of the editor’s Lydia Child who published the book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl that turned the country upside down. It also underwent many name changes after it stopped running in the 1870s. It continued to reform with the advancement of society. So once I started to look at how it was connected to other things of its time period, the article became much easier to write.

So I thought the hard part was over. Just get it written and then post to Wikipedia. WRONG AGAIN. After attending class, all of this technology jargon was thrown at me and I became excessively overwhelmed. All this talk of “code” and such had my head spinning. One of my classmates locked eyes with me and we had that “Help me!” look. Going into Wikipedia, I didn’t think it would be that complicated. Even thought my classmates tried to help, it made my apprehensiveness of the situation worse. So one day I sat down and sucked it up and decided I would figure it out. With the help of my Wikipedia Cheet Sheet and looking at other templates, I was able to successfully finish my article and format it for Wikipedia standards. I’m glad that I finish it and it’s now over. But writing for Wikipedia will not be a habit that I will ever develop.