Brain Candy #80 - Wikiauthor

In past articles, I've occasionally touched on how I put together an article. My basic source of inspiration is the Web, almost always. Some months, I pursue a theme. In these cases, I do active research and write a theme-based article. If not, and this is usually the case, I look at what I've been looking at in the last month, and try to extract something of interest.

My last month's activities have been based on two themes: New Orleans webcams, and the Wikipedia. The best of the New Orleans webcams, I fear, have come and gone with Fat Tuesday, although if you want to sample them, you can find the ones Catherine and I were watching at www.nola.com/. That leaves the Wikipedia, which I wrote about in Brain Candy #77.

Since I wrote that article, most of my experience with the Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.com) has been as an author. While the Wikipedia is meant to be an on-line encyclopedia, it is also a collaborative work. Absolutely anyone can contribute, barring the handful of users banned for vandalism or uncompromising bias. Even they can come back after a time - banning is not necessarily permanent.

The Wikipedia relies on the existence of numerous individuals who want to write. It offers people who want to write encyclopedia articles a place to contribute their efforts to the Web. There are parallel projects: Wiktionary (wiktionary.org), Wikibooks (wikibooks.org), Wikiquotes (wikiquote.org), and others, to serve other needs.

I got started by disambiguating "Valkyrie" from "XB-70 Valkyrie." In other words, I created a link so that people looking for the North American XB-70 aircraft named "Valkyrie" would find it, even if they only typed "Valkyrie." The primary article is about Norse mythology, but at the top of the article, an airplane aficionado will now find a link to the airplane article. Because of me.

The first article I initiated was on the "SL-1," the reactor accident I wrote about in Brain Candy #59. I shortly followed this by an article on "Egyptian Mau cat." Here I ran into trouble. While I rewrote the "SL-1" article significantly from what I had written in the Brain Candy article, I took the Mau article mostly unchanged from another web page I had written (home.neo.rr.com/catbar/e_maus/maugal.htm). In short order, I was busted for "copyvio," basically violating copyright on a posted web article - my article. Since I wrote the original article, it was a bum rap. I won the day by changing the original page to say that a version of the page was posted on the Wikipedia by the author - this was rapidly picked up by a sysop at Wikipedia, and my article was restored.

I've done 30 articles since early December as user "Catbar." One article, "Jake," a product adulteration incident in 1930, was a featured new article on the main page for the better part of a day. I've also added articles on the Bass Islands, Theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore, the movie "Forbidden Zone," Jalapeno, actressess Linda Hunt, Susan Tyrrell and Toni Basil, the Niagara grape, a list of grape varieties, author Sue Grafton, severe storms researcher Tetsuya Theodore Fujita and astronaut Thomas Akers, among others. I've tweaked other articles and worked on some Wikipedia projects like one devoted to fixing multiple redirects. A redirect can be established so that when someone requests a topic, like "CPAP," they are redirected to the real article "Continuous positive airway pressure." This allows many synonyms to refer to the same article. The Wikipedia software doesn't handle well the illogical case when a redirect points to another redirect, so a large list was assembled of such cases. It only took a few days of volunteer effort to fix all of them. There are other special Wikipedia projects aimed at fixing similar defects, or which target the development of new content.

The Wikipedia has some surprising gaps. For instance, I found it hard to believe in an encyclopedia that had 200,000 entries, that there was no entry for "rattlesnake." I wrote a brief one, called a stub in Wiki parlance, and then returned later to flesh it out. Now it's a fairly reasonable article, but I'm still surprised that someone knowledgable didn't write it in the first place. No one has come in to modify it significantly, either - another surprise.

People have their own specialties. I like to create new articles - this is probably most common. Others like to fix mistakes, while some specialize in enforcing neutral points of view (nPOV for short) in the articles, and others revert vandalized articles. For an example of a frequently vandalized article of late, try "Prohibition."

If you just want to read a few examples of good articles try "Irish Potato Famine," "H. P. Lovecraft," "All your base are belong to us," "Joshua A. Norton," "Batman," "Superman," and the list "Wikipedia:Unusual articles." If you want to try your hand at Wikipedia, you'll want to go to "Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page."

The Wikipedia is a natural for Mensans who want to write. On the other hand, if you fit that description, the Braegen and the Bulletin might like an article from you, too. If you like to write, please indulge yourself.