Jrc191

Name

My name is Jordan.
Ich heiße Jordan.

Place in Class

I sit next to Guang.
Ich sitze neben Guang.

Reason for Creating a Wikipedia Account

Dr. Scott Alberts' Intro to Interdisciplinary Studies class.

Sinnloses

Ich habe gestern Abend nicht ganz so viel geschlafen, also müssen Sie mich wegen meiner leeren Seite entschuldigen.

About Linking

When a spider builds its web, the beginning structure is very minimalistic. There are just a few border pieces of spidery silk material that from the basic shape of what the finished product of what the web will look like. As time goes on, the spider spins more and more, linking those first few strands of the web together, and in the end creating a comfortable place in which it can sit back and wait for food to come. This is also the idea behind Wikipedia. It started with a few articles which then linked to other articles as more and more users began to share their expertise. Now Wikipedia has achieved full web status, but, unlike the spider, Wikipedians do not sit back and admire their work as they wait for internet users to get lost in the countless links and pages Wikipedia has to offer, rather, they continue to work hard and ensure the accuracy of information which is being presented.

The linking of the Wikipedia articles is by far the most interdisciplinary part of the whole experience. One can instantly get a complete article—presuming it has already been written—just by clicking a link on a different articles page. Thus, users are instantly updated and have all unfamiliar terms explained to them by people who, for the most part, actually know what they are talking about. It is even faster than looking up the word in the dictionary—or on Dictionary.com. This feature allows users to become more interdisciplinary by the minute by learning about multiple topics simultaneously.

The process of getting rid of “orphans” is, thus, essential to this feature, because the orphan pages are their own little islands to which no one can come without a direct search. The idea behind interdisciplinarity is that everything is related to something else. Thus, these orphans must also be related to other articles and fall into, perhaps, several categories. The job for interdisciplinary Wikipedians is to find out what these other categories and articles are and link to them.

Truman

This user is a student, alumnus, or friend of Truman State University.