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Growing up, I moved often; I was born in the Northeast and I’ve lived in North Carolina, New York, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and traveled to many others. Throughout my travels I’ve experienced many things, but I’ve never considered the knowledge I’d gained as something worth sharing on Wikipedia. In fact, had I not engaged in my Media Digital Literacy class this summer, I probably would’ve went my entire life without editing a page on the website.

Do not misunderstand, I truly appreciate and support Wikipedia; I’ve even maintained monthly donations when I could afford to do so. I simply believed that, since anyone could edit the pages, there was no need for me to add my uninformed thoughts to the pages I interacted with. As such, I had no clue what editing a page looked like, nor did I understand the mechanism behind the process.

Choosing A Topic

Throughout the class, I learned a lot about how the process for contributing to Wikipedia worked, but choosing a page to edit was a daunting task. I wanted to choose something I felt confident about (I often refer to myself as Jon Snow) and could locate sufficient evidence to support. Most of the knowledge I had confidence in was commonly known, so I had to dig for something a bit more personal.

Olney High School (2003-2007) was an interesting time, and my experience with the high school was most definitely unique. I had participated in a program to help students ‘catch up’, if they were in danger of falling behind by taking 9th and 10th grade classes in the same year. I participated with the Chess team which played in the Eagle’s Chess tournament and attended through the change from a single school into Olney East and Olney West; two distinct schools under the same roof.

Let’s Talk

I decided to check the Olney High Wiki page and noticed it was a bit lacking in details, an unexpected boon. In traditional wiki-editor fashion, I went to the talk page and posted about my intention to update the page. There wasn’t a lot of information included on the page but I wanted to ensure I gave proper notice in case my update was irrelevant. I had already located a few resources to support my update in addition to an article that spoke about the school being combined into a single Charter school in 2011.

I waited a few days before pulling the trigger and making the edit. I was slightly disappointed that no one responded, but considering the page had so little written about it; I was not surprised. Gathering the evidence to support my edit before making the change helped to keep the process smooth and though the page isn’t comprehensive, it’s one step closer to accurately describing the school I spent so much time at.

In Summary

This assignment, while unorthodox, really helped solidify the lessons learned throughout the class about participating on Wikipedia. As an open collaborative project, it’s easy to imagine that the information added is of lesser value than a traditional source. I would now argue against that mindset as much of the information included on these pages are managed by passionate individuals of this global community.

Since I was unable to interact directly through the talk page, I spent some time looking through the history of Olney High School’s page to see how it evolved over time. Most of the edits appeared to be students of the school at that time, mostly silly quips about school legends and favorites teachers; all of those edits have been removed at the time of this blog. The edits are still visible in the history and I think that’s a beautiful feature that traditional sources could seldom, if ever, replicate.

I don’t know if I’ll make any more edits on Wikipedia any time soon, but I definitely feel more confident in my ability to do so. I enjoyed learning more about the platform and can’t wait to personally return to supporting their mission financially. The service it offers is one I don’t want to lose, so any actions I can take to ensure the project continues are well worth taking in my opinion.

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