Learning WikiCode goes well with this course and with the other course I am taking in which we’re learning HTML!

I definitely see a major drop-off in quality and depth of coverage from the more fleshed out, sourced, and developed articles like Digital Preservation, to the more sparse Community archives article. At first I was looking at it on an iPad, but now that I look at it on a larger desktop computer screen, its lack of depth really stands out among the other articles. I like the ideas on the Talk page about what’s missing and how to improve this article; it just seems like nobody has implemented them yet, so this could be a good place from which to start.

Overall I’m very impressed with Wikipedia, from the suggestions on how to make articles better, to the many suggested sources, to the relative civility on most of the Talk pages. A lot of the Talk pages are debates about semantics, but this is important for an encyclopedia.

As a former professional editor, I did find some grammatical issues, such as where the Data curation page reads: “Data curation is typically user initiated and maintains metadata rather than the database itself.” I think it should read: “The user, rather than the database itself, typically initiates data curation and maintains metadata.”

I’m also still learning what qualifies as a subjective value judgment on Wikipedia. For example, on the Digital Preservation page, the line “It is a difficult and critical process because the remaining selected records will shape researchers’ understanding of that body of records, or fonds” seems true, but I probably would have left out the first part and just written “The remaining selected records will shape researchers’ understanding of that body or records, or fonds.”

Interestingly, as I write this post, the blog is underlining curation as a word it does not recognize!