Wednesday, January 28, 2009

The Wiki Assignment

Wikipedia search: Read and examine the following terms in Wikipedia.

Questions to consider:
  • How is the information organized?
  • What's in the introduction of the wiki?
  • What are the headings?
  • Is there any media?
  • How is this wiki page related to other relevant wiki pages?
  • Are there any information 'gaps' on any of these wiki pages?
  • Are these pages kept up-to-date?

1 comment:

  1. Amanda Oakes

    The wiki on Asian Americans appeared to give a large amount of information with a focus on important Asian American figures. It included a large amount of images, statistics and graphs that had the affect of legitimizing the wiki while displaying the diversity of Asian Americans. This wiki also had a lot of sources and citations. Overall this wiki seemed to focus on the individual achievements of famous Asian Americans in different fields. I found it interesting that one of the first things discussed in the wiki was the wealth of Asian Americans.

    The last page update for Asian American history was over a month ago as opposed to the more recent updates for the other wikis. This wiki is in need of more citations all immediately alerted by Wikipedia. This wiki is made up of a rough timeline without much information per date with, a brief assessment and the end and a major link to the Asian American wiki. The lack of information presented gives way to major gaps. This wiki was also last updated over a month ago.

    The hyphenated American wiki also needs a lot more information added to it. It lacks the motivations for the formations of groups such as Asian Americans and African Americans etc. There are articles and information out there, but it is not included in this wiki. I think the political cartoon image is important and potentially describes the motivations of this hyphenation in better ways than the rest of the wiki.

    The wiki on African American music had a good number of links and was very recently updated (February 6th). It gave to the best of my knowledge, a good outline of the history of “African American” music which highlighted a great many artists and techniques such as “call and response”. The headings were organized in an easy to understand timeline. There does not seem to be many noticeable gaps on in this page. The painting featured entitled “Banjo Lesson” I find to be a little stereotypical of what can be defined as African American music.

    I found the wiki on Latin American music to be much less informative and more problematic then the African American music wiki. First of all, the terminology seems incorrect for what they appear to be attempting to describe. There is a focus on the Spanish speaking counting in Latin America with the exception of Haiti and Brazil. The Anglophone, francophone and Dutch speaking countries of the Caribbean and South America have been completely ignored. By definition the region of Latin America includes all of Central and South American and includes the Caribbean which appeared to be what the authors were going for in the introduction. The headings range from music by country to overall characteristics and the ambiguous “Indigenous Music”. This wiki was recently edited on the 5th of this month and gives some good links to other pages.

    ReplyDelete