One Stressful Week and One Lesson Learned!

This week I had three midterms, two quizzes, and three assignments due.  Everything was going well, until I had to do Wikipedia Part 3.  I had my entire assignment prepared, but when I went to edit the page on Friday night, I realized that the page I wanted to edit was locked and that I did not have permission to write on that page!  I started to panic, because the assignment was due in a few hours.  I read every Wikipedia page possible, and I talked with different users.  After a lot of extra work, I did the best I could to get my assignment submitted. 

After that fiasco was over, I realized why more people don’t edit Wikipedia more often.  It’s hard, and unfair (yes, I know that the world is unfair, but Wikipedia seems a little extreme considering it’s an encyclopedia).  My page was protected because irresponsible people put inappropriate and profane language on the page.  This stops people who have good intentions from adding to the page.  Another problem is, even though one user does a lot of quality work on a page, and provides accurate information, another user, who may know nothing on the topic, can simply delete all that information.  This decreased the value of the page, and Wikipedia (and seems a little unfair), but unfortunately I cannot think of a real solution to this problem.  

If there is one thing I take away from this experience, it is that I now understand why Wikipedia is never a good source, and that it is always important to check the validity of your sources, because anyone can put anything on the Internet.