I had my own experience contributing to Wikipedia today in the article on hyperinsulinemia. I chose this topic because it is relevant to my studies in nutrition and I knew I would be able to find reliable and valid information to contribute to the article. Before my addition to the article there was already some information on hyperinsulinemia. I did not feel that all of the information was from reliable and valid sources, however I did not touch any of the writing from other authors, rather I added information. In this case the readers will have to look at the references for each part of the article, as my section contains information only from reliable and valid sources where as other information may or may not be true.
This was my first time ever making a contribution to Wikipedia and I was actually surprised at how easy it was. At first I had some difficulty figuring out how the references worked and ended up adding the first few multiple times until I really got the hang of it. Other than that minor road block everything else was pretty straight forward. I added three paragraphs to the article: one in the introduction section, one in the causes section and one in the treatment section. I used six peer reviewed journal articles to gather information on the topic. After reading the articles I tried to simplify the information a little bit to make it more accessible to the general population. Within my paragraphs there are also link to various other Wikipedia articles such as "hypertension," "obesity," to name a few. I thought this was especially important when I used big words or words that are not common in everyday language. This way if the reader doesn't know what a word means or wants to read more about that topic they can simply click on the word to take them to the Wikipedia article on that topic.
Here is a preview of the article, click here to view the complete article.
Image from: Hyperinsulinemia (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved March 23, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinsulinemia
The most important thing I learned about writing a Wikipedia article is that it is very easy to do and anyone can add to or edit articles even if they don't have valid and reliable sources to support their writing. It is so important to make sure that any information from Wikipedia is from reliable and valid sources; it's not enough to simply trust that it is, you actually need to look at the references. My colleagues have also been blogging about Wikipedia this week. Steph and I have similar points about Wikipedia, read more about her thoughts here.
