Wikipedia Articles

Wiki's are an amazing way for people around the world to share information with each other for free. Anyone with internet access can search any topic, and professionals, experts, and enthusiasts can communicate what they know. Instead of having to work around copyright laws and publishing rights, information can be provided free of charge, in an easy to access format. However, readers must be critical of unpublished sources, and ensure that concepts and facts they find in wiki's are backed up with scientific literature or other reliable sources. It's an example of buyer beware: it is up to the web surfer to think before they blindly believe everything they read on the internet. Fellow classmate Meaghan discovered this first-hand, when she realized most of the information she was reading about entire animals on Wikipedia was wrong!

As often as I've used Wikipedia, I never considered contributing to it. While I knew the articles weren't necessarily written by professionals or professors, it never occurred to me that undergraduate students could have written the articles I use everyday! In fact, someone who knows nothing about a topic could do a little research online and create a Wikipedia article. For the most part, this is what I did- while I had learned about PSE meat in some of my Animal Science classes, I had forgotten a lot of the details. So this exercise was very useful for me. Ironically, I knew right away what stub I would chose to write about, because I remembered searching for this topic on Wikipedia before, and being disappointed there wasn't more information.

Learning the Wikipedia code system wasn't as hard as I anticipated. I found that creating bullet points, bolding text, and creating subheadings was quite simple. However, I did struggle a little bit with the references. Getting the footnotes to work properly took a bit of tweaking. Then I ended up manually changing the information within each reference code, to correspond to each of my references. When a source was used more than once, I just copied and pasted the entire code. It surprised me, that while the Wikipedia article pages are very clean, simple, and easy to read, the editing page is not! Personally, I don't think the page could have been more difficult to work with. Everything from the font, to the codes mixed amongst the words, made it very difficult to review and edit your work. Once I had inserted my lengthy reference codes into the edit page, it was almost impossible. However, with a little persistence I was able to cross all my t's and dot my i's, so that the format was the way I wanted it and all references were in place (Fig 1).

Fig 1. christy267 (2012) Wikipedia: PSE meat, [screenshot]. Retreived March 22, 2012 from Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/75279061@N06/7007710243/in/photostream

You can check out my Wikipedia page here. Feel free to edit, add, and expand! Everyone should get involved in sharing their knowledge. While my PSE article is a substantial improvement over the two lines of stub available before, there is still plenty more information that should be included. In addition, I think my article could be edited to read simpler, with less scientific jargon. I found that after four years of writing technical papers and reports in University, it was hard to appeal to a general audience. Maybe there is an educator out there who will see my article and have some ideas of how to make it simpler and more accessible to the public. If a few people learn something about meat quality and pork production from my article, I'll be ecstatic!