Monday, April 18, 2011

Reflection On Becoming A Wikipedian

I've checked my high school's (Christian Brothers Academy) wikipedia page everyday since this assignment just to see if anyone noticed that I substituted "Track and Field" in for "Lacrosse" under the "Most Competitive Sports" portion of the opening paragraph. Thus far, nobody seems to have noticed (or cared for that matter, being that our lacrosse team is quite pathetic). In the assignment I added some tidbits in the main sidebar adding the school slogan and school founders. As I read through the page I saw how they barely even mentioned the Army JROTC program on its page. Now most people don't know that our JROTC program is within the top 10% of all programs in the United States, has been an integral part of CBA since its founding, and that it was possibly the most important part of my high school experience. Now I've known the school has not been exactly "hot" for the military program, but it has certainly straightened out its fair share of crooked teens over the years. So I put my little pitch in there for the JROTC program and that was that. This assignment showed me how simple it was to edit a page on wikipedia, thus giving me the title dubbed "Wikipedian," but also how key it could be to have someone to monitor the page for you. I could have wrote some pretty damaging things on their (without using vulgarity or causing any red flags), and it probably would take the administration a little while to notice. After thinking about this I searched my own name on Wikipedia just to check and see if there was a page for me and there wasn't. So now I'm debating on making one for myself (insert maniacal cackle here). All in all, I believe this was a very good assignment on teaching students how to make their voices hear in places other than blogs or other public forums and I enjoyed it a lot.

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