Friday, May 11, 2007

Evolution of Tap Dance Wikipedia article


Tap dance has been a passion of mine ever since I was three years old, and being that it has been such a big part of my life it only made sense for me to choose the tap dance wikipedia article as of of my topics to edit for this class. Once I got to the article I realized that although it was not a long article, it certainly did cover a lot of information. This made it very difficult to find information to add or parts to edit, but dont worry, I somehow found things to add.

When it came time to do my first edit to the article I shocked to find that there was absolutly nothing writtena bout National Tap Dance Day, which was a day that I had celebrated through my years of taking tap classes. I decided to add a sentence or two about the Day, when it is, and why that date was chosen. This edit is still in tact even though almost immediately following my first edit another editor came in and added a ton of additional information.

In my second article edit I found it difficult to find information to add since one person added a lot themselves. The edit that I did come up with was a sentence and a link to a webpage where a reader could access more information at the International Tap Association homepage. In addition to this I noticed that the other editor added some common tap steps but, although they got the major ones, they did miss a few, so I went ahead and put them in.

In my final edit to the article I stumbled across a webpage with a lot of tap information and I realized that it was word for word the information also located on the wikipedia article. So, in order to give the original writer credit I added a link on the wiki article to the outside webpage. I also added the britannica definition of tap dancing, which I though was an excellent definition and a vital bit of information to anyone seaching the topic.

Overall, there were not many editors to this page, but rather there was one really intense editor that dominates the history page. This person made it difficult for me to find more information to add but it also increased the quality of the article. Once again, no one deleted or edited any of the information that I added which makes me feel good and that I know what I am talking about. This is an active community of editors and while going through the hisotry of the edits I did find that some people wre agressively deleting information and content that they did not feel was necessary, luckily none of my edits were the ones deleted! I feel that all of my edits/additions were important and added to the overal quality of the page. Hopefully other people visiting the site will feel this way as well.

2 comments:

Sharon said...

I was really excited to see that you used tap dancing as one of your Wikipedia articles to edit because I, too, was a tap dancer when I was younger!
It's so much fun & such a cool style of dance...I do miss it & you did a great job with this article, Andrea.
Maybe we can tap dance some time?! haha ;-)

Andrea said...

When we were choosing articles to edit for this project this one seemed only natural since tap was such a huge part of my life. Im excited to hear that you used to tap too!! have you ever taken classes here at school? they're pretty good.