Wikipedia Contribution

When contributing to Wikipedia for the first time, I found it a little difficult to decide on what to write about off the top of my head. Obviously, it is easy to think about things you are familiar with, so I wanted to write about something sports related. However, well known topics such as hockey in general or the Buffalo Bills or Sabres have a huge amount of information already posted. It would be hard to make a large contribution on any tiny details that have been left out. Also, athletes are well known so it would be hard to contribute a lot of information on Jim Kelly, for example, without personally knowing him or having inside info. I came up with the idea of contributing info about something local that might not be known so i could contribute a lot of information. I went to high school at Kenmore East, right down the street from UB, and there was only a paragraph or to under it's listing on Wikipedia. Therefore, I had the knowledge to make a significant contribution.

At first, when skimming the guidelines and tutorial that Wikipedia has set up, it can seem confusing and a process that someone wouldn't want to deal with. But when actually taking time to see what it takes to contribute, the process is not hard at all. Some Wikipedia entries are very fancy and contain pictures, charts, and graphs and the average internet surfer might not have any idea what to do. The area where text can be edited and contributed recognizes special code set up by Wikipedia.

• typing ''this'' (quotes around a word) results in this on the actual page. '''this''' turns into this, and ''''this'''' into this.
• Typing ==This== crates the commonly seen headings. This example would turn into something like this:

_This_________________________________

• Putting the word Hockey into brackets - [Hockey] - creates a link in the article that, when clicked, takes a viewer to the Wikipedia article about hockey.
• A table of contents is automatically created for the page when a couple of headings are added
• This makes it easy for an article to go from the rough text based window to the actual visual page, kind of like this blog

This makes it easy to go from the rough text based window to the actual visual web page without much hassle. It is much easier to create a visual Wikipedia page than I had originally thought. Also it is easy to see how any information can get into a Wikipedia article. I could have said the football team won the state championship last year, even though that isn't true. If undetected, this could stay on the internet for anybody to see and base their information on.

Since I edited the page on Kenmore East on November 27th, it has gone unchanged. There is a neat feature on Wikipedia that displays when changes were made, and specific changes can be compared side by side showing exactly what was done.
Overall, I think it was a good experience to try, and would encourage me to post on Wikipedia in the future. It is an interesting idea that anybody can contribute to an encyclopedia of sorts, and it makes you feel like you are a part of getting info to others.