I love Wikipedia.  Whenever I need to know something about anything, that’s where I go.  Maybe it’s laziness, but I never go directly to the Wikipedia site – I always Google the topic and then the search results lead me to Wikipedia.  I guess I love Google, too.

What I didn’t know about Wikipedia, though, was that ANYBODY can edit an article’s content.  I knew that’s what the general purpose of a wiki was – collaboration – but I just find it amazing that any Joe Schmo who thinks he knows a thing or two about red wine, let’s say (because I’m currently drinking some), can go on and edit the article to his liking.  I learned from the Wikipedia article about Wikipedia that Joe’s edits appear online instantaneously, whether they’re accurate or not. If not, then hopefully another one of the article’s contributors, one who knows more about red wine, will make needed corrections.

The first article on this week’s reading list pointed out that most contributors to Wikipedia are editing only a portion of an already existing article, not creating a new article from scratch.  I understand why.  Writing an entire article seems like a daunting task, and I didn’t even see where you go on the site to “create a new article.”  To anyone reading this: I’m curious – have you ever contributed content to a Wikipedia article?  And if so, is the content you added still there or has it been re-edited?

For work, I do document control.  Anyone who has worked in a FDA-regulated environment knows what that is.  But most of the time I end up having to explain to people what it is that I do, and it gets annoying.  I just searched for “document control” on Wikipedia and it re-directed me to an article on “Document Management Systems.”  A document management system can be part of document control, yes, but there is no explanation of the process or purpose of document control, only the computer system and how it works.

I would like to create a Wikipedia article for Document Control, so that the next time someone in a noisy bar asks me what I do for a living, I can say, “Document control – look it up.”