Wikipedia Is Not as Easy as it Seems

Haley Trecarichi

As a student, wikipedia is often a source that I come across immensely in research. I often choose not to use this search engine though because of the freedom users have to post and edit on it. Although, after doing this activity today I have learned that it is not as easy as I thought to create and post a wikipedia entry. Today, in this article I am going to discuss the difficulties and success I had while writing a wikipedia post.

The first and most important aspect of my wikipedia post was selecting a topic to write the post about. This was much more difficult that I suspected. The topic had to be something I was educated on, something not already on wikipedia, and something that was accurate. I found a lot of trouble in finding a subject that met all these requirements. In order to find something I went on wikipedia and typed “WP:RA” into the search engine as you can see in the screenshot below. This gave me a list of different topics and entries to look at. These topics gave me a better idea of what topic I should chose to write about.

I researched and read about many different topics and articles that were already publshed on Wikipedia. The hardest part about picking a topic was finding one that was not already greatly wrote about on Wikipedia. It is a very large information platform and already had almost all of the topics I was very knowledgable about. I ended up choosing to write about Lake Shoji which is a lake in Japan. I chose to write about this because I remembered learning about it a while ago and it was something that had little information about it already on Wikipedia.

My next step was to practice writing about Lake Shoji on Wikipedias sandbox. This is a feature that Wikipedia has so people can practice writing an article and see how the process works before actually attempting to publish on Wikipedia. I typed “WR:SB” into the Wikipedia search engine and wrote everything I remembered and researched about Lake Shoji. A screenshot of Wikipedias sandbox page is below.

Finally, I searched my topic in the search engine on Wikipedia and clicked add entry. Then, I began to write about Lake Shoji. Below is my entry before I attempted to publish it.