Littera Deusto

Modern Languages, Basque Studies and Humanities

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The Wikipedia experience

mayo 4th, 2012 · No hay Comentarios

Taking part in Wikipedia has been an unforgettable experience. It is quite an experience to notice that so many people try hard to make Wikipedia a serious and intellectual encyclopedia. If something is not written as an encyclopedia, they do state that it should be written in another way, and it is great to see that people care about it. It is interesting to notice that not only one person writes the article, but many people do it at the same time, which is one of the most enrichening elements Wikipedia has.

We had our articles’ drafts already planned and written down in our Littera Wiki  so we really only had to transfer them into the real Wikipedia. What really amazed me the most is the speed with which people work at Wikipedial. Just a few seconds after having uploaded our version, corrections appeared all over the article by people and even robots. The links were corrected almost intantaneously, as they were external links which were turned into internal ones.

Another thing that thrilled me was the fact that Wikipedia itself connects through robots all the articles written about the same topic in different languages. Although it can be done manually (and some of it, we did) Wikipedia has the means to link the distinct articles; that is to say: when we uploaded our Basque article it suddenly had the links for the Chinese, English, Spanish, German and French articles.

Furthermore, we also had to upload a picture on Wikimedia Commons in order to be able to add it to our article. It was amazing to see how all the Wikipedia franchises are connected to each other in an exquisite way: you have to upload pictures to Wikimedia Commons in order to put them in Wikipedia; as for texts we find Wikisource, for instance. The fact is that several minutes after having put the picture there, it was put out, and that is another thrilling element of Wikipedia: as everybody can interact and take part on the manteinance of the web, it is very easy to have things corrected, doubted and taken off from your article. In that way, I consider it a success not having had our articles deleted from there.

I think it is an unforgettable experience, that everybody has to live once in their lifetime at least. Now, I am going to try to upload a new picture into Wikimedia Commons, with the hope of not having it erased. The fact that everybody can cooperate into creating common knowledge is a privilege that not many people had before.

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Filed under: Web Communication, Wikis Tagged: Encyclopedias, English Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, Open Content, Open Source, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, Wikisource

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