LAST BLOG POST!

I am finally done my blog! It took a lot of time and effort, but I am finally finished. I learned a whole lot through this process. I feel like I can confidently say that I am very knowledgeable in the area of blogs. I also know much more about Wikipedia than I did before I took this class. This was one of my favorite classes here. It was not torture going to everyday like it is for some of my classes here. Professor Brown always made classes interesting and very informative. I especially liked his touch of humor, his phrases from England, and his self proclaimed obsession with Barbaro! I am glad I was able to take this class with him and not another professor because I do not think I would have enjoyed this course as much with any other teacher. All in all, I enjoyed this class very much and I wish the best of luck to Alex in whatever he does after his days at the University of Delaware! Thanks for everything!

Evolution of the Fuze Beverage article

I chose to edit the Fuze Beverage Wikipedia article because one of my friends was doing a project for food marketing at her school and she gave me the idea to edit the Fuze Beverage one. The Wikipedia article actually was redirected to this link, so it is not the same link as I had been referencing before. I had the most problems with this article and I will explain it all in the end. It started out as a very weak article with the types of beverages and the official website. I had many options of what to add and I was just going to keep going with what was already there.

For the first edit I chose to keep it simple. I saw that they had listed the flavors of Fuze Beverages, but there was one missing so I added it. It was Fuze Vitalize and I added that it contained vitamins A, C, and E. Later I found out that you are not supposed to list these, but I had no idea seeing as how that was basically all the article consisted of when I first looked at it.

The second edit is where I added some background history of the company. I included the founder, how and where it was created, and how it became successful and spread across the country. Again, I think that sharing the company's history is very important and can be helpful for someone curious about Fuze Beverage and how it came to be.

For the third edit I decided to delete the whole article. I was curious to see what would happen and how the Wikipedia community would react when they saw that this article was no longer there.

There were several edits besides mine. One edit was that they changed the slogan, did some maintenance, clean up, and made some small changes. Also, they redirected the article's url because it was better used to describe electrical fuses. Then they started saying this article was spam (saying: "Yeah, the subject matter may be legit, but the way this is written sets off my spamdar, big time.") and they said it was advertising because you are not supposed to list the flavors because then it seems like it is advertising the product. Someone even wrote this in the history, "Have you seen the state of this page? It's about as encyclopaedia-like as this comment." Pretty harsh and by the way they did not even spell encyclopedia correctly. So that is when I decided that this article is hopeless and it should just be deleted. So I erased the whole thing. Surprisingly exactly 12 minutes after I deleted it I got a message saying that I was not allowed to delete it without having a good reason. Then in the history when they undid my deleting they said it was "blanking silliness." I thought that was pretty humorous. I have no idea why they would even care if the article was there or not since it was such a bad article that they criticised for everything about it. Instead of criticising it they should have deleted the advertisement things and added more substantial information that would be appropriate for an encyclopedia to make the article better.

Since this is my last comment on Wikipedia I thought I would share my overall thoughts about it. First, the Wikipedia community seems rather weird to me. They seem very particular about what they want in the article and do not like new people and outsiders messing with the proper rules of Wikipedia. Second, I do not think this should be used as a primary reference source because of the fact that anyone can edit it. Third, I believe this only works for articles in which many people have high interests in. In this case many people will be continuously looking at the article trying to improve it and edit the errors put in. Finally, I think with more and more users everyday, Wikipedia does have the potential to be great, I just do not think it is at that point right now.

Evolution of the Villa Maria Academy article

I chose to edit the Wikipedia article for Villa Maria Academy. An article did not actually exist before I chose to edit it so I created one! I thought it would be rather hard, but it was actually just as easy as editing an already existing article. I chose this subject because this is the high school my sister and I went to. I was surprised that there was not an article for this already. I would think that the high school would have been teaching how Wikipedia works to the students and would have suggested they create a Wikipedia article for Villa Maria Academy, but that was not the case. I was eager to jump in and get this article up and running.

The first edit for Villa Maria Academy started with me creating it. Like I said, this was really easy. I started out by just explaining what the school was. Then I listed some things that the high school has to offer. Some of these aspects included music, athletics, and guidance. Then I gave some more brief information of the school. I also listed the address and phone number for VMA. I thought this was a good start because it was the basic information that I thought the article needed to get going.

For the second edit I added some information that was a little more detailed. I listed a bunch of events and activities that take place at the high school. From pep rallies to dances and other memorable and traditional events, I thought that this would be a nice addition to the article. It shows more about the high school than boring facts that you might normally see in a traditional encyclopedia.

The third edit I added the box of information that I also did for the MGIC article. I did it for this article first before I did it for the MGIC one. I got the idea from another Wikipedia article of high school that is all boys near Villa Maria Academy called Malvern Preparatory School. I thought that VMA deserved to have a similar article, so I helped it to get to that level by adding that box with the brief, quick information.

There were two main users that contributed to this article, besides me. They erased the phone number and address. They also categorized the article because I did not do that, but supposedly you are supposed to when you create an article. Also they fixed and cleaned up the article a little because I guess I was too descriptive and not as information and straight to the point as an encyclopedia edit should be. I think I did a pretty good job laying the framework for this new article. If I had more time I would expand on it to make it a great article to properly represent how much that high school means to me. Hopefully someone else will become motivated and take over the article and make it an impressive one. There is many more thing that can be added to it, so that should not be a problem. Like I said before, maybe the students will even be directed through a technology class to work on this article. I am proud that I was able to create this article. I think it is was more rewarding to create this article from scratch as opposed to editing the other already existing articles. I hope someone else finds it just as rewarding as I did as they make the article better!

Evolution of the MGIC article

The reason I decided to edit the Wikipedia article for MGIC (Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Company) is because my dad works for this company. Although my dad does not work in an MGIC office, he is a contract underwriter for MGIC in a Sovereign Bank office. I thought it would be interesting to learn more about the company and be able to personally contribute some more useful facts and information. When I first looked up the MGIC artcile I noticed that it was not very developed so I saw that as a great opportunity to improve upon it.

For the first edit I had just heard that MGIC announced a major change in their business. I wanted to add that to the article. The change was that premiuims are now tax deductible with MGIC. This was a significant advantage of the company and I thought that it should be available for people to see in the article.

In the second edit I added information about the company history. I explained how the former real estate agent and founder, Max Karl, realized his clients would benefit from insuring only the top portion of their mortgage. I think the company history is important for any subject matter. It is always good to know how a company or product came about.

I decided to add a summary box of the corporate profile for the third edit. I really like this feature because you can look at the box real quick for some fast facts without having to read paragraphs of information. This is very useful for people who just want to know a little bit about the company and it easily directs you right to the corporate website where you can find tons of information on the company.

In the end, no one really contributed much to this article. There were a few edits before I started editing it. These of course were the start up edits and then some people added some extra information. The article was still pretty lacking in some information before I started editing it. It was interesting to see that the people who began the article did not add anything to it after their initial edits. Within my edits there were only two additional edits. Thankfully again, they did not change anything I wrote. They just added to the categories of the article. After my edits there is still plenty of information that can also be added. I am curious to see if the other people who added information will add anything more. I will probably be checking back in the history even though I am done editing the MGIC article to see if this happens. This article has great potential and maybe it will even be comparable to the corporate website. I also enjoyed editing this article and I am glad I chose it as one of my four articles to edit on Wikipedia!

Evolution of Forever 21 Wikipedia article

To reiterate, I chose to edit the Forever 21 Wikipedia article because I worked there over winter break. I wanted to see what the Wikipedia community had to say about Forever 21. I found the article to be very interesting and very informative. I learned a few things by reading it. Also, the article was not too long so I knew I could find several things to add to it.

My first edit I just added other stores that are in the Forever 21 chain. Those are Heritage 1981 and Gadzooks. I did not add a lot at first because I was still getting used to Wikipedia and did not want to push the limit too far right away.

For the second edit to the Forever 21 articles I added a little about the history of the company. I explained where the first store was and how the size of the store and number of them increased dramatically.

The last edit was a little harder because I felt that the article contained all it really needed. I decided to add that you are able to shop online on the Forever 21 website. I thought this was a useful piece of information.

After looking at the history there have been many edits that were done in between mine. Most of them were by three different users. The others I guess did not log in and there were about four or five that only edited once. Thankfully none of the things I added were deleted. I guess I was right that my additions were helpful and useful to readers of this article. The article is still not very long, but I think it contains all the useful information that this article needs. If more was added I think it may get turned into an advertisement in which I will definitely be blogging about concerning my other Wikipedia article edit. I enjoyed editing this article. There was only one problem, when I would look on the official Forever 21 website for ideas on what I can add to the article I would get distracted by looking at the clothes. I think that will stay my favorite store for a long time. I was happy to be able to contribute to this article and hopefully more people will find the interest to make this article even better than it is now.

Last Wikipedia Edit for MGIC

Finally, I am on my last edit of my last article! For this MGIC edit I decided to add another box with general information on the right of the page as I did for the Villa Maria Academy article. I do not know why, but I really like this feature! Included in the box, I added the corporate profile. I thought this would be useful for people who just want a quick summary. It seems as though the information would be good for someone who is looking to invest in the company or may just want to know some general financial information about MGIC.

I added this exactly:
Name Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corporation
Headquarters Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Symbol MTG on New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)
Index Included in Standard & Poor's 500 Stock Index
Principal Subsidiary MGIC, the nation's leading private mortgage insurer
Financial Strength Ratings Standard & Poor's, AA; Moody's Investors Service, Aa2; Fitch Investors Service, AA+
Company website www.mgic.com
Investor website www.mgic.com/investor
Industry website www.privatemi.com

I do not know if all this information is relevant, but I found it on the main website so it should be useful to at least one person. If it is not, I know by now that someone on Wikipedia will definitely fix it.

Last Wikipedia Edit for Fuze Beverages

The third and final edit to the Fuze Beverage article which was redirected to this link consisted of me deleting the whole article. Now you may be thinking why would she do that? I have a good reason, do not worry. First of all, like I mentioned above, someone redirected Fuze Beverage's Wikipedia article and made the old one into an article about electrical fuses. In order to do this you must give a reason and apparently it was because the current Fuze Beverage article was horrible. Second of all, Wikipedia said that the article looked like an advertisement. I am not sure how just listing the flavors is advertising, but to them it is. I must say though that they were already there before I started editing, I just added one flavor. The other thing I added was some history and I do not think that was advertising either. Third of all, I think that maybe because the article was so small and underdeveloped that another article was allowed to take over the site. So, I will wait a couple days to do my final wrap up of the Fuze Beverage Wikipedia article so I can see if anyone cares about it enough to put the information back or to improve on the article. We will see...