Wordsmithing

I found this assignment to be one of the more difficult ones, so I've been putting it off for awhile. In theory, it should be an easy assignment to simply make a few modifications on a "poem" of sorts, but I think that editing poetry is akin to a serious crime since you are changing someone's personal thoughts and experiences. Also, since this particular poem comes from the Rives poem, I can't bring myself to change too much since the Rives poem has that nice stream of consciousness quality to it.

So I just changed a few spots where commas were needed since I visualize the DI-Rives-poem as being read aloud just like the original, and commas are important to breathing and adding pauses for an audience to take it all in quickly. I also marked a few spots where I needed clarification or else had a question.

thank God! If you take a man's cookie he's got no cookie but if you copy it he might find it offensive, but you've got a cookie too.... Teach a man to copy a cookie and everybody gets to eat!

I liked this line- probably because one of my favorite quotes is similar - "Don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes, that way you have judged him, have his shoes, and are a mile away."

Anyway, I'm not really sure what further modifications could be made to this poem without telling DI that his poetic voice is wrong or that his experiences with the web didn't happen. I'll be interested to see what others think or want to add to it.

Wikipedia-ing

When I started editing the early college high school page in wikipedia, I just stuck to keeping my edits nice and simple- things I knew I wasn't messing up. Although it was nice to finally be able to get my hands dirty with editing a page in wikipedia, a site I visit frequently for information, I was still a little perplexed as to how the page itself comes together. From looking at what was already on the page, I could see some stylistic things that looked like Wikipedia's version of html. It was nice to actually read through the tutorial and be able to really make my profile page look like a real Wikipedia page.

I was surprised by how easy to was to create the footnotes and to link to topics already in Wikipedia. I thought that doing a reference would be really complicated, but it wasn't in the slightest. It's good to see a page that allows for so many to work on editing, adding, and enhancing the information together, but at the same time, keep the editing easy enough for anyone to be able to handle it. I also liked that Wikipedia presented their five pillars to using and editing Wikipedia - it made me feel a little more relaxed with changing information and adjusting to be able to know that anything I did incorrectly could easily be fixed. This really allows for anyone to go in and get hands-on and experiment without ruining everything. The sandbox mode was also helpful for this.

Overall, I give the editing end of Wikipedia a strong thumbs up. It was easy, and Wikipedia provided plenty of tools to make sure that you could get the final product you wanted (I love it when there is a preview button to see what you've done before it goes live.). This is definitely something I can see myself using and doing in the future. My Wikipedia Profile.