Wikipedia CPL 2.0

I do enjoy Wikipedia and find it to be quite helpful in a couple of different ways, particularly with my children.

One aspect I've tried to highlight to them, is to not necessarily believe everything that they read on the internet. Hopefully seeing the ease with which these articles can be changed will help make cynics of them all.

I had not previously tried to do any editing, so this was fun as well as eye-opening. I tried a couple of subjects that I thought I knew a lot about, and was humbled by the obvious depth of knowledge of the contributors to date. I looked up another subject, this time it was very broad. Although there was nothing blatantly incorrect, I found the entire page so clumsily written that it really needed to be entirely done over. Also, anyone with some knowledge on the subject would be fine reading the entry, but I think any neophytes may become confused on some aspects, as to me, there seemed to be some information that while not actually wrong in a factual sense, I found to be misleading. At this point however, I began to second-guess myself and wondered if indeed I was the one whose knowledge was lacking! So, I didn't touch that entry. I did manage to find an entry where I was able to make some small grammatical corrections, and when I checked on it a few days later my changes were still there. I assume they passed muster with the Wiki-Police.

Another thing I like about Wikipedia is that it is fast to find "something" on "anything". Sometimes you "don't know what you don't know" and I have found Wikipedia to be a great starting point for further investigation.

As for finding an article that wasn't covered by Wikipedia, well, my 13 year old son said "write about our family, then I can tell my friends I'm on Wikipedia!". He was correct - nobody had covered our family in this expansive encyclopedia, and I think we'll leave it like that.