Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Sticky Wiki

Any time I think I need to look something up on the Internet, I usually wind up relying on Wikipedia.  There's a problem with that.  Wikipedia can be changed/edited by anyone.  It is monitored, however, so outrageously false information won't stay on it for long, and they do require citations by way of proof for what has been posted. 

In making my last blog post about my father, I was trying to remember the school shooting at his high school back in the 1970s.  Went to Wiki, naturally, but found it not listed in the article about school shootings.  Hmmmm...  I began to doubt my recollection.  Did it really happen?  Why wouldn't it be listed?  It met all the criteria of the article, but it just wasn't there.  Know what?  It wasn't ANYWHERE.  Meg and I searched online for a couple of days for news articles, etc., using several different search engines, to no avail.  Turns out, I was searching under the wrong year.  Once I got that corrected, a promising newspaper article showed up, then I found a link that referenced The Chicago Tribune's archives.  Found it!  Unfortunately, reading the article meant I would have to buy it from the archives...which, this morning, I did.   

Meg suggested that I should add it to the Wikipedia article.  Ack!  Had never done anything like that before, but I decided to try.  Had to make several attempts to get it in the proper format, especially for the cited reference, but I got it done.  Yay, me!  So...if you read the Wikipedia article about school shootings, my entry is for October 1, 1973.  (Just don't expect me to do anything like that again!)

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