This past semester in the Applied Plant Ecology course, I learnt a lot of about Wikipedia I did not know. The thought process I had coming into this course was that Wikipedia isn’t a website that you should use and all the information on that website is incorrect. Learning about how Wikipedia works and how it allows you to edit articles in different ways allowed me to understand that Wikipedia helps provide structure and resources to help edit and publish new findings. This also changed my views on this website and I know am a firm believer this website has a lot more to offer!
Dr. Dawn Bazely gave all her students an opportunity to use online resources to complete training modules to better understand the functions of Wikipedia. Throughout this training I learned 5 things that I will forever remember when I am using Wikipedia:
- learning plagiarism isn’t just the normal plagiarizing (3 different ways)
- understanding sandbox is a place to discuss and work with citations and literature
- Wikipedia is a place to grow and learn and understand editing is more than just rephrasing literature
- having a strong reliable source through analyzing articles is important
- citing references are very important and they are needed on Wikipedia or you could get copyrighted
My experience was different than I thought it would be, my first-time editing a Wikipedia page, I was super flustered with the talks, sandbox, with how to add citations. After training, it helped me when I was re-editing the Wikipedia page on Environmental Effects of Mining! I was able to better understand how to insert citations within a section without getting confused. When I re-edited using the dashboard, I was able to add more references without getting confused. I learned that there were multiple ways of plagiarism and it was needed to be understood to avoid acts and copyright issues. I did not know that close paraphrasing was even a real thing that could be done!!
With all the training that was done, the contributions I added to Environmental Effects of Mining really showcase all the skills I learnt. I was able to add strong reliable sources from journal articles and review papers, I learned how to cite properly, and I was able to see how sandbox drafts worked. Contributions to Wikipedia taught me that Wikipedia is not only a site that someone gets information from but it’s a site that is like a big blog where a bunch of sources are coming together and expressing what they know about that one topic.
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 
