The million-dollar question when it comes to Wikipedia is always… is the information reliable? While there are cases where certain pieces of information get worded to fit the opinions of the Wikipedia editors, there is a lot of true factual and reliable information on the platform. For my first time editing in Wikipedia, I chose to analyze an article about a city in my hometown, which was Sherwood in Little Rock, Arkansas. I moved away from the city when I was a child, but I still visit every year to see my dad and his side of the family. When reading through the article I was very vigilant for mistakes or facts that might be questionable. I was surprisingly unsuccessful at finding any facts that weren’t backed up by a reliable source. The multiple authors of that particular article made sure to cite sources that were credible, like facts from the U.S Census Bureau or statements from the cities website. In terms of the assignment I was bummed to find a lack of misinformation, but as a reader, I was thrilled to learn that every fact I read was coming from somewhere reliable. Knowing that the information being provided about an entire cities’ history was thoughtfully edited and researched made me feel more comfortable about getting information from Wikipedia. There is always controversy over the information on the site and whether it should be used to back up a statement or not, but like with any other type of information, the reader should be responsible for making sure the information is coming from somewhere or someone credible.
Since I was unsuccessful at finding any facts or statistics that I could disprove, I chose to add onto an area of the article that I thought was lacking in information. I chose to add a statistic under the “Economy and Business” section of the article. Highlighted below you can see the statistic that I edited into the article.
The statistic I added explains how many employer firms there are in the city of Sherwood and how many are male versus female owned. My father just recently started his own business there and that sparked my interest in the amount of employer firms in his area.
Before making the edit, I added a statement to the “talk” page that explained what I wanted to edit and that I was a first time Wikipedia editor.
I did not receive any feedback from my statement, so I went ahead and added in the edit anyways because I felt like more information that could be backed up by a reliable source would help expand the articles economy and business section. Before you are able to publish an edit on an article, Wikipedia prompts you to explain the type of change you are making before you publish it. That step in my opinion helps drive away users who might be adding false information as a sort of joke. Overall, this exercise opened my eyes to the process that goes into editing a Wikipedia article. It isn’t as easy as they make it out to be, and providing misinformation would be difficult with how thorough a lot of the statistics in each article are.