From Wikipedia Stub to Article

In the past, the majority of my searches for information on Wikipedia have yielded a plethora of relevant information to be used at my leisure; however, with the task of looking for a Wikipedia stub that I could convert into an article, I was amazed by the sheer number and variety of existing stubs. It was an overwhelming experience trying to sift through the different categories to locate a topic that lacked enough information to leave me room to work while retaining the potential for me to track down that information through other reliable sources.

After this searching process, I initially settled down on a stub titled 'Edible Ink Printing' only to promptly redirect my efforts to another stub on cyberphobia one day later. Five days ago, this stub had nothing but a dictionary definition to begin with; as you can see by the screen shots below, it has been reformatted and updated with the final compilation of information that was currently available on the topic.

Screen capture of my Wikipedia entry about Cyberphobia capture from: 

Clara Tran, personal collection. Original article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberphobia, Accessed Mar. 23 2012.

 
As cyberphobia is a condition that affects individuals, I thought it made sense to organize the page using category tags like 'symptoms' and 'treatment', both of which are headers that are often associated with physiological conditions and/or illnesses. Finding the information to fill these categories was far from an easy one as I had difficulty finding peer-reviewed, scholarly articles that explored this specific phobia. In my experience, peer-reviewed articles have been reliable sources of information because of the fact that the information has been reviewed by others outside of the experiment. However, because next to none of these papers turned up during my searches, I relied on my own abilities to judge the relevancy and reliability of the information found on other websites to construct the full article on cyberphobia.This diminishes the reliability of my article greatly, but I did my best to remain objective and select the most relevant and useful information.

Later on, I would come to realize that finding the information itself was the easy part - dealing with the codes used to write Wikipedia articles was the tough part. Looking at other well-written articles certainly helped, but trying to track down the codes I wanted in these other articles along with the constant hopping between windows to transfer the coding over proved to be very trying on my patience. Like Susan Nielsen, I highly support the idea of Wikipedia being an online, openly-accessible compilation of information, but it struck me during my own attempt at editing that their coding system could serve as an unnecessary obstacle to many potential editors that may have a lot of useful knowledge to share with others. Even after I took a look at many of the articles on Wikipedia that attempted to explain some of the coding tags, I was frustrated with having to skim these articles for the information I needed; furthermore, many of these articles were flagged as "too technical" to be easily understood. In the end, for the sake of managing my reference list properly, I had to mangle the Wikipedia coding in favour of producing a proper citation. In the future, I hope that Wikipedia will adapt their coding system so that it is more easily used and navigated by the general population.

Through my attempt at transforming a stub into a full article, I came to understand how easy it is to compile information and make it accessible to others using Wikipedia. Whether or not that information is reliable is, at times, hazy even with the best of references, but as with all information online, some critical reflection on the part of the reader is required to determine the quality of the information presented.