Devon.evanovich

Devon Evanovich 101D Summer 2018

Interesting image of a 15th century egyptian anatomy of a horse

Preface: I was not aware that the Wikipedia portion of this course was so extensive, therefore I am starting this blog at the beginning of week 3. Week 1 and Week 2 will be my memories of my experiences of and starting from week 3 I will be adding additions weekly.

My name is Devon Evanovich and I'm a MCD and History major at UCSC. I am motivated to take this course as it perfectly finds the balance between both of my majors and I am thinking about pursuing a history of science PHD. I hope to learn more about the research aspect of the history of science and in general improve my communication skills as a science historian. My first language is English, I can read a little mandarin Chinese and Spanish. I love sailing and gardening with my grandmother although I wish I had more time to do both. I also enjoy going to museums and on my last trip to Europe I was able to visit many science history museums.

I am excited to begin the journey into being a wikipedian! It is my first time actually logging in but I have used wikipedia for my entire life just about.

I chose the the history of science as my topic. I really want to add the importance of the search for the soul to the histroy of medicine. I have a primary book by galen with the original greek for his work translated next to it.

Week 1

Blog Posts

Week 1

I was very excited about starting this course although it seems very daunting. I am currently taking another class and often find myself rushing around to get everything done. I enjoyed the online nature of the course and am liking the course content and introduction to the course. Far too often are courses broadly reductionist to one perspective and I am excited to explore and delve deeper into more ideas and perspectives about science.

Week 2

The course is very demanding, but this is to be expected from a 5 week upper division history class. I am currently able to keep up with the readings and the quizes but find myself getting closer and closer each time. The readings made me want to be more empathetic to the people that lived during this time. I went outside one night and just stared at the night sky for hours. I tried to imagine if I had no information about the solar system or planets, or stars, what would I imagine is happening up there. I realized that it literally looks like heaven, that each star looks like a white place behind it covered by the blanket of the night sky.

Week 3

I just starting Wikipedia articles and am excited to learn more about editing and contributing to Wikipedia. Will update more later! I am delving deeper into my topic and the more that I try and look for content gaps or biases within the topics that I want to explore the more that I am having trouble. Im having this really weighty feeling that there is so much to know and there are so many qualified people that know it and edit these pages that I'm looking at that it is feeling more and more daunting to actually begin or find articles. I know what I want to write about and I have sources that are reliable and good. Finding out where those fit is going to be my upcoming challenge. We just learned about the importance of books, multiculturalism and language in class and I had the realization that wikipedia is a modern extension of the way that people in the 1700s would review books. In this way wikipedia is a big experiment in Library science. I took a look at the Talk page on the Darwinism page and it was very detailed and people clearly think about the exact words that are used in some of the wikipedia articles. They started to talk about syntax and meaning of word phrasing. I just edited the source code to reposition my table of contents on this page! My sandbox is looking pretty good for this page and I am excited to explore wikipedia more. I may try and add a photo or two.

Week 4

Just got some tips from our master wiki editors and they mentioned that my topic is a little thesis driven. Im finding it hard to pull myself out of writing with a clear point that I am making. I am so used to, and have been trained to have an argument and give facts that support that argument. I think today I made some adjustments that make it more encyclopedic but I am driving the fine line between that and writing original research. So far I am really enjoying my topic about medicine and the soul. It is so interesting to explore the way medicine was understood back then compared to how it is understood now. I even found a 40,000 dollar book of hippocratice's corpus form the 1500s so that is fascinating. I would love to have that! I did the peer review training and left a comment. Our class is so diverse and there are so many interests that it is fun to look around and see what people are working on, and see the process of creating the articles.

Week 5

Just started week 5 and I am getting a little anxious about actually posting my article. However, I am reminded about the first lesson that I did on Wikipedia 5 weeks ago, that you must be bold on Wikipedia. I think that I have novel content that is supported by many reliable sources and is useful to wikipedia. Im sure that there will be comments and discussions about my page, and in the end it might get deleted and moved to be in a different article. I think it is more important to try and submit the article and to get the world's feedback than to not submit it in the first place. I looked back at the first edit that I made and it is still there! Wikipedia has informed me that 10.6K people have viewed the page since then! it is exhilarating to know that I have some sort of contribution to that many peoples learning. I hope to have a similar effect with my article. Im in the process of properly citing the article now and will submit it once that is complete.

I just uploaded my very own article. I feel very accomplished!

Week 2

Article Evaluation

I choose Darwin's Theory of Evolution to evaluate:

While the theory of evolution is similar to the theory of gravity this article seems to be attacking creationists. While I don't necessarily agree with creationist this phrasing seems too critical for wikipedia: "Though the term usually refers strictly to biological evolution, creationists have appropriated it to refer to the origin of life,". It could be that Creationist use the term. although they did link the article for creationist so it is clear what type of creationist they mean. I dont know where this might fall but it mentions conceptions about darwinism only to say that they have no connection to darwanism, why not just exclude these perspectives then?

It is difficult for this topic as all opinions are supposed to be included but this reminds me about the debate of whether or not creationism should be taught in science classes. I dont think it should or be compared to science but in terms of wikipedia and with this topic should it just include relevant things that are facts and not things about common misconceptions. Should perspectives that are misleading but popular, well cited, and talked about be included. If yes then wikipedia is just as much of a refelction of the society that we live in and not strictly a information source. I guess they talked about breaking the rules in the tutorial. Interesting!

I tried a couple of the links and they all worked!

One of the links is referenced to the primary source of darwin, that is both reliable and neutral as it is about darwanism.

None of the information seems out of date and it seems like the talk sections is regularly used.

The talk section used a quote, does this not violate the rules?

I checked out the first edit from 2001 and it was only a couple sentence long, how crazy things adapt! John lynch was the first guy to make the entry.

The information presented here does not make any conclusions, I tried editing a different page earlier and was very tempted to make a connection between two ideas that I had. The discussion sections on canvas are even supposed to do this, but here everything has a clinical feel.

Discussion: What is a Content Gap

A content gap is an area of an article that is complete but there is necessary information missing, or other perspectives that need to be added in order to get a better encyclopedic content of the topic. A possible way of finding them is to read articles that you are familiar with or have read recently and see if there are aspects that are missing from them. Content gaps arise as one person editing a topic does not know everything about that topic, or all the perspectives of that topic. As more people review and edit articles, naturally content gaps are filled. I can help by reviewing and editing as many articles that I can and adding to that content. If it is accepted as a content gap then it will stay in the article and forever become part of the internet and collective human information. Yes it matters who writes on wikipedia as everyone should write on wikipedia. What I mean is that it is only truly encyclopedic is if there are perspectives from everyone. Obviously there needs to be highly educated people in topics writing and reviewing and contributing to content gaps, but it shouldn't only be. Unbiased means that it does not try to conclude anything about the information that is being presented. When I put information on wikipedia it needs to be as neutral as it can be so that it can be an encyclopedia.

Adding to an Article:

I added to the history of science wikipedia page about the importance of the soul that is still there a week later! Thats exciting that people want it to be there and recognize it's importance.

Week 3

Discussion: Thinking about sources and plagiarism

Blog posts and press releases are considered poor sources as they often come from one perspective and are not editing or reviewed well. They also offer as very bias perspective, which is a good and interesting form of knowledge but is very unreliable, often information is not cited or sourced. The company's website is a very bias source of information as they will always present their best information there and nothing about their negative news. Therefore while the information might be reliable and true, it is bias as it does not present the entire story. A copyright violation is the use of quotations or information that you cite but is still illegal to use because it is copyrighted. Plagiarism is trying to pass someone else work off as your own without citing it. It is a good habit to re-read your work to avoid close paraphrasing. What I often do is I will cite someones work and then add my perspective to it. Furthermore there are plagiarism checks that you can run on your written work .

Choosing possible topics

I am looking at the history of the seat of the soul or the medical soul and have yet to see anything about this. There is a lot of information regarding the seat of the soul in the context of medicine and how it was understood to be part of medical discoveries but no information of wikipedia about it.

So 1 topic might be to create a new wikipedia page about the seat of the soul or medical soul.

I could also improve on the page that is the "soul" under the science section by adding a medicine section and history at Soul#Science

Week 4

Discussion: Thinking about Wikipedia

I get it, neutrality and strictness is really a way to create a wealth of information. We have journal articles and other ways of communicating original research. Also, who reads the entire wikipedia page of a topic. It needs to be neutral as often people are coming here for a very specific piece of information or source. I have such a hard time doing it though. It is such a different kind of writing than I am used to its hard to adjust. What limits wikipedia is that It cant really comment or argue on events that are controversial. We have these very carefully crafted works but you end up not getting the perspectives from either side. That is really the limitation of wikipedia is that you cant get perspectives of the people creating the articles, but they never wanted or try to do that. These sources are realiable, peer reviewed and published. The issue with this is that often only well documented pieces of information are able to be on wikipedia, so it can only record documented information. Information on opinion or experiences are not able to be put on wikipedia despite they being relevant to the issue or topic. For instance a Palestinian military officer's opinion vs a Israeli military officer's one. Furthermore things may have happened and are important, but not written down or researched. Things like women histroy, people of colors history is often not well documented and often not in journals, therefore it would be hard to include these topics. Well essentially wikipedia was written 100 year ago, even a 1000 years ago if you think about the first encyclopedias. However if the vast and universal access by most people in society was available to be edited and written by anyone, it would include a lot more articles and sources as people would of perserved or drew attention to certain topics.

Week 5

I have not received student feedback on my article and therefore am unable to respond to it.