Editing Wikipedia

For some help with week 2's homework I read  Brain Lamb’s article,  "Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not.", and it provided some useful background knowledge about Wikis. In particular, the article described the elements which comprise “true wikiness”, the first principle being that “anyone can change anything”, with this in mind I felt confident to give editing Wikipedia a go. However, the next challenge was figuring out which Wikipedia page to edit.

I can’t claim to be an expert on anything terribly significant but one thing I do know a lot about is TV. Nicholson Baker (2008) discussed the popularity of Wikipedia in his article "The Charms of Wikipedia" highlighting that part of its vast appeal stems from its capacity to tap into the "heretofore unmarshaled energies of the uncredentialed". I must admit that this Wikipedia exercise has made me feel that the hours spent watching box set collections on DVD has not been a complete waste of time. Indeed, my latest TV obsession is a little known but enchanting series called, Pushing Daisies. It is a modern day fairytale about a Pie maker who can bring the dead back to life with the touch of his finger. 

There was little room for improvement on Pushing Daisies' comprehensive Wikipedia page. However, I created an account and gave the plot section a tiny bit of tweaking in order to learn about how to edit a wiki. It was a straight forward process, once I clicked 'edit' I simply typed my text into the existing plot summary and saved the changes.

Below is a print screen image of the editing process. The red text indicates the change made to the plot section. It’s a very minor adjustment but I think it’s an amusing part of the plot that was missing from the summary.  The URL for this Wikiepedia page is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushing_Daisies#Plot .

Barker, N., ‘The charms of Wikipedia’. New York Review of Books, March 20 2008 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131