Talk:Assignment 1 Submissions

I may have ventured into Pandora’s Box, but I chose to edit the living person biography of Rayful Edmond http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayful_Edmond observing the No Original Research policy. Trying to edit or even create a biography of a living person is under very intense collaboration with the Wikipedia community. These articles must adhere to United States laws that apply and must be neutral in point of view, verifiable, and cannot be the opinion of the Wikipedian. This protocol is obviously in place in an effort not to upset the continuity of the living person’s life and protect the integrity of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation.

To avoid a citation/violation from an Administrator, one must substantiate the materials with valid documented sources/references. I have found you can cite most any source/reference with the exception of a blog. Source referencing is broken down into three categories: Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary. The sources I cited on the Edmond article were all secondary – information from second-hand accounts derived from primary sources. Rayful Edmond’s article was somewhat under developed in my opinion. I have followed Edmond on and off for years and after review, I came to this conclusion about his Wikipedia article. However, the information I know about Edmond fell beyond the confines of the parameters of No Original Research policy because I could not find sources of validity.

In an effort to fully understand my chosen policy, I have taken my assignment one step further by creating an article on a living person not presently on Wikipedia. I created an article on The Honorable L. Todd Burke http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Todd_Burke. The citations/violations I received from Wikipedia for creating this article are as follows: This article may not meet the notability guideline for biographies. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. (February 2010); This biography of a living person does not cite any references or sources. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living people that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately. (February 2010). Although I did receive these citations, the article, fortunately, did not get deleted. In addition, I followed the methodology for sourcing by obtaining primary sources directly from Judge Burke and secondary sources from Internet publications.

I am very new to the Wikipedia family and although I did not receive any citations/violations on my editing process of the Rayful Edmond article but did receive them from the article I created from ground zero, I gained priceless insight into the governance aspect of Wikipedia as it relates to the No Original Research Policy.

In addition and in my opinion, I have found Wikipedia’s structural hierarchy relates directly to Yochai Benkler’s model of the Internet but perhaps with an ever so slight variance. The variance seems to be in the governance of Wikipedia because it ties directly back to the users, the select group of Administrators in charge preserving and maintaining continuity.

Finally. The No Original Research Policy poses no eminent harm to the community. However it could get a little "dicey" because the debates still remains over the accuracy of information. This is a loophole in which someone could really become litigious and challenge the information. Accurate or not, Wikipedia still remains one of the most used cites on the Internet today.

--Indira1966 19:05, 8 February 2010 (UTC)