Practicum Post 1

My topic for our practicum project is wiki participation. This was not my first choice but because i love history I do not mind being required to be on wikipedia for 15 hours. I confident enough to say that every single person in our class has used wikipedia. I personally use it everyday and besides google it is the most important website on the internet for me. The difference between my personal use and my use in the project is that now I am a member. When you just search something in wikipedia, you are solely a guest of the website. So the first thing I did was to make an account. To my surprise, I learned I already made one. I do not remember when or for what but I did.

For the first hour I decided to devote my time to exploring the features that are open to members. On the top right side of the page are the user tabs. The first one is "my talk." This is the wikipedia messaging system. Why they call it "my talk" and not just messages is beyond me. Since I do not know any other members or had the need to message anyone, my "my talk" was empty.

The next tab is "my preferences." This includes 10 difference areas of customization. As you could imagine, there are the obvious personal preferences that I do not have to go over so I will only talk about the ones that I found interesting or wikipedia specific. The first interesting feature is the skin customization. There are nine pre-made skins to choose from. I decided to stick with the default since that is what I am used to. Even cooler is the ability to make you own skin using CSS or JavaScript. I wish i knew either computer language because i think i could make a pretty great looking skin. Another cool preference is the watchlist tab. The watchlist feature allows a user to put pages on a list and to be notified every time it is edited. This is almost like having ownership of the page without actually owning it since if a mistake is made you can fix it immediately. The last personal preference that I found very cool was the gadgets feature. Basically there are a lot of gadgets that are similar to apps that wikipedia offers. For example, the GoogleTrans opens a translation popup for the selected text of word under the cursor when pushing the shift button. I plan on using an exploring many of these gadgets.

My first experience as a user went pretty well and I can't wait to be a contributor so that i can learn more about wikipedia.