Day 1- On my first day I just created my wikipedia account. I tried to use a username that couldn’t be tied back to my identity or my gender, which was pretty hard. Signing up was easy and I was surprised that I didn’t have to verify my identity or any education status.
Day 2- For my second day, I was just playing around with Wikipedia to get a better idea of how to navigate it. I never really used this website because for all my life teachers and other adults advised me to steer clear of it because it wasn’t a credible source.
Day 3- Today I understood why I was told to steer clear of Wikipedia. I noticed that I could edit any post without it being fact checked. This was astonishing to me because it means anyone can edit anything and add their own perspective and bias to certain pages which makes the information really questionable.
Day 4- Today I started looking into the Wikipedia Red list and looked at a few of the women on the list to get a sense of who I wanted to pick. There were many options and I decided I wanted to choose an activist because it fits with the theme of what we’re learning in class.
Day 5- Today I looked up the Wikipedia Red list again and chose Ing Wong-Ward, she was an activist for the disabled, and a journalist. She had a wikipedia page dedicated to her but the information was very broad. The only stuff I found out about her was that she was born with spinal muscular atrophy which was why she was wheelchair bound, she had colon cancer, a little about her career like she worked on CBC, and her personal information like when she married her husband and that she had a daughter, and that she sadly passed away at 46 due to cancer complications.
Day 6- I tried to do more research about Ing Wong- Ward. Sadly, the only information that popped up was that she had passed away due to complications with her inoperable colon cancer. The other piece of information I found out was that she refused a medically assisted death stating “I‘m dying with dignity” and she “didn’t want to pick a date”. She fought hard against her cancer undergoing 28 rounds of radiation therapy, she fought so hard because she wanted more time with her 10 year old daughter.
Day 7- With a little bit of a deeper search I found an interview with Ing Wong-Ward. In this interview she talked about a little of the work she did, that was the only time I saw information about her work. Majority of stuff online about her is just about her losing her battle to cancer and that she worked for CBC.
Its surprising how us as students usually look stuff up on wiki without knowing how accesible it is.
I had the same feeling as you when I discovered how easy it was to edit the information on wikipedia.