Hunting Down a Stub Post

My most recent project has been to turn a Wikipedia stub article into an article that meets the requirements to be a good article on Wikipedia.  This last week made me appreciate how much effort and time has gone into making Wikipedia what it is today.  Continuing the trend on hunting from my last post, I decided to create a stub article on Turtling, or the hunting of turtles, into a full fledged article.  The complete Wikipedia entry can be found here.  Creating the Wikipedia article was no where near as easy as I had anticipated, and took hours of research on the subject, and another while choosing the most relevant information.  The time that took the most amount of time though was learning to navigate Wikipedia's system and creating the article itself.  Once I had started creating the article I was determined to make a piece that I would consider to both informative and complete, and I feel that I accomplished my goal.  In much the same way as Curtis Vieville, who also transformed a stub article, I am finding myself becoming attached to my article. Below is a picture of a typical green turtle.  My research found that around 22 000 of these green turtles have poached around Mexico each year for the past decade.

             WikiMedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
Retrieved on March 22 2012          

After completing my article, I realized how the information I had created was accessible on the Wikipedia site almost immediately.  While I have been told that Wikipedia should not be used for literary sources, I had thought that the work uploaded was looked at to see if it contained relevant information, which I now know at least does not happen instantly.  I usually use Wikipedia several times a week for personal questions and also to complement my school textbook.  Completing this assignment has made me realize that perhaps Wikipedia is not as reliable as I had once thought.

I found it interesting that I completed my first section of my article less than a day ago, and someone has already been through the article and made slight adjustments to my work.  One of the adjustments that was made was removing the stub article listing at the bottom of the page.  At first I felt exhilarated that my article had been approved by Wikipedia, I later realized that none of my grammatical errors I had left in the article to fix on my return were corrected.  After viewing this persons profile in anticipation that it was in fact a Wikipedia creator, I realized that the profile was in part controlled by a bot that uses Autowikibrowser and automatically makes repetitive edits that would take humans hours of work.  After further researching this profile, I noticed several awards at the bottom of the page about the contributions of this person, and I also noted that all of the contributions made were on the topic of turtles.  While my article was not completely edited, I felt proud that someone/something had at least noticed my changes and made me aware of how big the Wikipedia community really is!

While I now know that Wikipedia is not as reliable as I had previously thought, I will still continue to use Wikipedia.  However, I will now check the references at the bottom of the page to see if it links to primary sources before I rely on the information.  Maybe in the future I will continue to transform stub articles and give back to the system that has helped me so much.

Take care,

Josh Perryman