My Minor Edit
While I have been a Wikipedian for a few months now, today I learned how to move a page. In the past couple of months I had done exactly what this assignment asked for: find areas of my expertise and add something important to the page. Today I was surfing around on the House Committee on Agriculture and I noticed that the Subcommittee on Specialty Crops, Rural Development and Foreign Agriculture was missing a "p" in it's title. I immediately changed this problem on both pages, but realized that the link was now dead as there was no page with the correct title. So I had to figure out how to move a title. I immediately put help me on my own talk page, and someone came to help me out. I realized I simply needed to use the "move" button, but was looking for a topic about changing the name of a title, so I couldn't find as much.
So that was a small edit that took a lot of work, but I think I have put in my time on Wikipedia. After a few trials and tribulations, I created my first ever article on Wallace Jerome, an alumnus of my fraternity and I was able to pull information from many resources to create the article. I enjoyed doing this report because I had some passion for it. It probably would not be argued as a non-neutral article, but I did make sure to include Alpha Gamma Rho as much as I could.
I really liked the statistics from Lih. It was not only interesting to see the average and median numbers of people editing articles, but also which articles were hot topics at the the time the research was done.
In response to a previous posting, I just want to make it clear that Wikipedia strives NOT to be a democracy. They understand (as should the people of a democratic society) that the majority is NOT always right, but instead tries to be through voting on ideas. In Wikipedia we are striving for the best and most complete answer, not the one voted on. So while 50 people may say that the subservient chicken is fake, if one person can prove that it is not (or just edit more often than the other 50) their entry should not be disregarded. Wikipedia even explains the idea that it is not a democracy.
The Subservient Chicken is just another example of pop culture that is some sort of advertisement. Brier's talk of viral advertising was amazing. I have seen basically every ad he was talking about. While I did not go out and buy a Honda, it made me think the company was cool, so I can see it as a great PR stunt. Great PR stunts should go down in history, because they are risks, and when they turn out they are innovations in their field. In my opinion it can be included along with things like the Commercials section of the page for Super Bowl XLI. Pop culture is history whether we like it or not. If your publicity is good (or bad) enough for enough people to care and write about it, it will go down in written history. The only things in encyclopedias are the things people care about, and in this case things wikipedians care about. If everyone cared a lot more about the current status of my life (I amazingly found no article) than Overlord (1990 Computer Game), I would have an article, and maybe Overlord would not. The thing is, history is all about pride. That's why those who win the war write the history. When you have a positive affiliations for your job, where you grew up, or what college you attended, you seem to stick up for it. For the most part, that's what wikipedians do, stick up for what they know. So in a lot of cases it is self promotion, or verifying that their life matters. But, until someone else dislikes what you do enough to delete it, it will stay. You can always revert. (P.S. I do not know what Overlord is, but it was the first article that popped up when I hit "random article". P.P.S. I love random article, you can (meaning you might, but not always) learn a lot with just a few clicks)