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So, while perusing the wondrous domain that is the online community of encyclopedic knowledge that is Wikipedia I decided to edit the pick-up line page. Clearly this was of the utmost importance to the academic community and so I proudly took the initiative to update the world about pick-up line information that may not have been known to previous Wikipedia readers. So, as I got to the page I dutifully clicked on the link to edit the article and purposefully scribed a subsection that was glaringly missing from the article: Harry Potter pick-up lines.

Okay, so maybe not everybody cares about Harry Potter pick-up lines (even though I believe that they should), but our class assignment was to edit a Wikipedia article and seeing as that I had looked up Harry Potter pick-up lines instead of studying for my government exam the day before (which I aced by the way, feel free to short me dirty looks for that) it was a topic I knew I could contribute to. It was pretty simple adding in my own subsection, though admittedly I did look up formatting information; but considering I’ve never edited a Wikipedia article before it was very user friendly. I suppose that’s both a good and a bad thing. The good part is that since it’s user-friendly people who know a topic well can easily input information that can aid people who know little to nothing about said topic. The bad part is that since it’s user-friendly people who don’t know a topic well can easily input information that can hurt people who know little to nothing about said topic.

The bad side being said though, I hear that Wikipedia has a pretty good system set-up getting rid of incorrect or irrelevant information. I know first-hand that my old high school computers were blocked from editing articles because too many false reports were added from the computer. Also, upsettingly I found a few days later that my addition to pick-up lines had been removed. I assume it was because of the irrelevance of the information on the larger scheme of things. So Wikipedia does have some safety in the validity of its information.

So Wikipedia has its good and its bad, and I suppose it’s up to each user whether they will trust its information or not, but I for one will continue to use it as a jumping off block until I get deeper into the topic I’m researching.