Wikipedia Stub Article

When we first got this assignment I admit, I was worried. I thought we would have to do an extremely scientific Wikipedia article and do intensive research. I found the code a bit difficult at first, to which my classmate Larkin agrees. Also, I wanted to be sure that I would not misinform the general public, so I chose a stub that I was fairly knowledgeable about already.  I was glad I chose to build on the Canada’s Food Guide stub. It was a really short article before I started editing it and I think such an important document needs a good Wikipedia page. This is especially true because when you search “Canada’s food guide” using the Google search engine, this Wikipedia page is the fourth result.

I started editing the stub this past weekend, before I went to the lab. When I got to the lab I found out two things that may work to my disadvantage. The first thing is our TA informed us that we were supposed to write a paragraph, and not thin out our information too much. This is exactly what I did when editing the stub, but I think it was necessary. The main point of the food guide is to help Canadian’s choose the right foods in the right amounts in each food group. It only made sense to have a heading for each food group and some basic, easy to understand information on each food group. This made the page easy to read and understand for the everyday Canadian, a feature I thought was done so well by Health Canada that I wanted to make sure the Wikipedia article lived up to it.

The second thing that happened once I got to the lab was I found out someone had edited the Canada’s Food Guide article. They had messaged me, saying my writing was not encyclopedic enough. This may have been true, as I had included tips for each food group and addressed the reader directly. I appreciated that this other editor helped me be more correct in my writing, but I did not appreciate that they deleted a lot of my work. I was also concerned that this other editor would change my writing a lot, but for the most part, they only changed the voice to less personal. I was then forced to improve upon what the other editor left for me. I added more information from some other sources and the article was looking pretty good once I was done. Here are some screen shots, I decided to do it in four shots, rather than one very zoomed-out shot, for easier reading: