Why Wiki.

So, as it turns out, I am the one who made a Wikipedia page for my 26 Lies/1 Truth project. Now I know on the outside this seems like a fun and cheerful little project to do. Let me be the first to tell you it was not. But I'll start at the beginning. Why did I want to do a Wikipedia page for this project? Basically I wanted to think of a creative way to analyze and fully understand the book. So I thought "I have never written a Wikipedia article, and that seems like something essential you should do in your life time, so I could take out 2 birds with 1 stone here." Plus there's no better way than proving you know a book inside and out than by writing an article about it, because it's not like you can lie. So it's a cool way to get inside the book and explain it to others basically. 

 

So how did I go about writing this article? Like I said, it wasn't all peaches and cream. What I first had to do was learn all about Wikipedia’s procedures for writing an article. For a source so many call "unreliable" they sure are sticklers about what you write. You need at least a few credible sources. This means, unfortunately, no blogs. Which made life REALLY difficult considering the whole book is a blog and its whole reference in the internet is almost exclusively in blogs. So basically I had a hard time proving to Wikipedia that this article was worth having. Yes, they actually exclude articles from being added to Wikipedia, though it may not seem like it with such scholarly articles like: Snoop Dogg's Hustlaz: Diary of a Pimp.

 

Wikipedia, I discovered, was like its own little world with a talk box for help and a bunch of rules and code I needed to learn. Once you get the hang of it though, it's not too bad. Like ==section== means the title of a new section or something. Next I had to learn Wikipedia’s formatting rules. As you may have noticed, all articles about books are generally set up in the same way, so I had to research this and find out all about this format and what it entails. Generally, descriptions of the book, plot and character overviews, and critical reception are common guidelines one should follow. Under these rules I proceeded to include a plot section, a characters section (albeit this was difficult with the author being the main character and the rest of the characters only having letters to represent them), a "controversy" section (partially to convince Wikipedia this was legit and important), and finally a reception section. In this sense it was set up like a traditional Wikipedia book article. I tired to include everything I could in each of these sections, but I could only present fact and not my opinions on the book which I discovered was difficult after having talked exclusively about the book for some class periods now. Looking back this was probably a short coming of this project, I couldn't deeply analyze without putting my opinion out there. I'm sure it's possible, I just can't do it. But I certainly hope others have the opportunity to edit and make my article better. Even for being a small article about a relatively short book, there is certainly still some more room for improvement. I hope people expand upon the character section, even going so far as to elaborate on the glossary in the back. The article is linked to the Ben Peek article, but I hope more could be done to expand upon his character. Otherwise, I am moderately happy with the article. Some things could be a little better if I had some more sources because, truth be told, there’s not a lot of scholarly things about the book in the internet yet. But that will change. With this Wikipedia article.