For this assignment I decided to edit the Little Red Riding Hood Wikipedia page. I have used Wikipedia quite a lot as a site for information. It is one that I would go to for quick information on pretty much everything that you would be curious about. I have used it for understanding something but have never used it as an actual site of reference and that would be down to the fact that anyone can edit it. Even though what I have added to the Little Red Riding Hood page was sourced and referenced correctly and my sources cited. I have no idea about the rest of the information. It does appear to be correct but when it comes to it, Wikipedia is not the most reliable concrete source to use for academic writing.
It is a great resource if used correctly by academics or people who are well versed in the pages that they are contributing to and are reliable with citing- I feel this would add a lot more depth to Wikipedia as a site for knowledge.
The editing process was quite simple. I have always wondered about Wikipedia, and know of friends who have edited pages jokingly (which is what adds to my qualms about Wikipedia being used as a reliable source because it is so easily edited). I didn’t realise until I went to edit my chosen Wikipedia page that it dealt with html. I guess, I didn’t think much about the whole process of editing a page on Wikipedia. I figured it would be more like a word document and I was wrong. When I clicked in to edit section I was quite overwhelmed because the Little Red Riding Hood page is such a large text page and trying to find and locate the area that I wanted to edit was somewhat difficult. All the text was located last within the html code. Editing an already created page had it’s good and bad points. It was both simple and difficult. It was easy enough to figure out how to link a page with the words e.g. to link Angela Carter to the Angela Carter Wikipedia page all I had to do was place her name inside double brackets like so: [[Angela Carter]] and referencing was quite easy because the book I was referencing from was already referenced with the text itself, I simple had to change the page number. Even without that added help, I feel it would be quite to figure out yourself how to reference whatever text it is that you need to. I was very relieved to figure out that the references update numerically themselves, I was worried at first that I would have to go to all the other references throughout the text to change them but you don’t. Wikipedia is very well set up to allow the user to edit with ease and to enable them to cite sources neatly, because it corrects the footnote references and the user doesn’t have to.
I had hoped to add to the page on Catherine Orenstein also but when I went to select it, a message came up stating that another “editor” had deleted the page and contact them before making another one. I found this difficult as I was unable to figure out how to contact them, so I have not done anything for this page, this is the reason why Catherine Orenstein is in red on the Little Red Riding Hood page because the link brings it to a deleted page notification.
So aside from Wikipedia being easy to use to edit your selected page (once you get over the initial feeling of being overwhelmed) the next hurdle is deciding what to add, change, delete etc. The Little Red Riding Hood page to me was quite full of information; information which I believe to be accurate. I decided to just change and add a little bit about the Company of Wolves adaptations of the story. It is an adaptation I personally find very interesting because it is a re-edit of the story from a feminist perspective which is then further “re-edited” and adapted into a film of the same title by Neil Jordan. I wrote a nice lengthy paragraph on it, but to be honest I could have written a lot more, but chose not to. The editing of this Wikipedia page raised a lot of questions for me. Ones to do with the rights to intellectual property. The authors and writers that I cited are open and readily accessible to the other readers of the Wikipedia page, but I am not. I may not have written the words I cited but I did write interpretations that I have about their work. It made me wonder about using what I wrote in my own thesis if what I wrote I put up on Wikipedia. Would I be plagiarising myself? I wouldn’t really be able to prove that I wrote what I wrote because none of us can tell who wrote this what is effectively an anonymously written collaborative writing piece.
The paragraph I have edited is down in Modern Uses and Adaptations.
Before:
After:
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