Firstly I’d like to start by thanking every single person ever who has edited a Wikipedia page. As a person who frequently (don’t pretend like you don’t use it too) uses Wikipedia as my quick go-to for answers, when I was assigned the task to edit a page of my choice, I was baffled. It’s not that I don’t understand the concept of open access data site like Wikipedia – I do – it’s just that I never thought I would be editing one. To swallow the strange and novel task of editing a wiki page, I chose to edit the page about my most favourite flower; the Purple Coneflower, Echinacea purpurea. Because why not write about the most beautiful flower ever.
I remember the first time I had seen a purple coneflower was a very long time ago, in the garden of a family friend who had a green thumb. At first I didn’t realize that these were purple sunflowers! I only made that connection much later on, as an adult, when I went to a flower farm in Milton, Ontario during prime summer season. After that trip from the flower farm, I innocently started googling purple coneflowers and found a bunch of information on Indigenous practices, of using the purple coneflower for its medicinal effect. This may seem strange, but many plants have beneficial properties to humans. Mainly due to presence of natural secondary metabolites, that not only act as a defense to plants themselves but to those that ingest them. So when given an opportunity to shed light on this stunning plant that has some medical properties, I took it upon myself to edit it’s Wikipedia page using a primary source of info. I have written a previous post here, where you can look if you have any further inquires about what a primary source of info is, and why I used it to create my Wikipedia edits.
Here is the primary source paper, that I’ve chosen to base my Wikipedia edits off. It’s an interesting read for those that have a interest in herbal remedies and the science behind them.
UPDATE: My thoughts on Wikipedia Edu.
When I first wrote this blog post over a month ago, on my experience being a first time wikipedian, I had done so without attending Wikipedia ‘University’. This is what Wikipedia Edu is. It is a formal training guide to teach novel wiki editors the rules and 5 pillars of contributing to Wikipedia. I found the dashboard concept of Wiki Edu to be helpful. It covered training on portions of Wikipedia that is used to make edits and used to communicate to other wiki editors. I did still manage to contribute to Wikipedia without completing the formal training but truthfully undergoing the training did make it more streamline. Still, without the training Wikipedia was surprisingly easy to contribute too. As long as you keep in mind general copyright regulations and are aware of plagiarism rules, any intermediate-skill leveled computer user should have no problem understanding how to contribute to Wikipedia. If I had knew before this task, how simple it would have been to contribute to my favorite wiki pages, I would have become a wikipedian a long time ago.
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 
