last post :(

I just wanted to make one final post on my blog to say thanks to Alex for a great semester!! I really enjoyed this class, probably more than all my others combined. The importance of this class was obvious even though some of the material was not my favorite. However, he made every class interesting and related what we talked about to real live situations, including his own life and his love of Barbaro! People keep asking me what teacher to take for buad477 and I would love to say Alex but I cannot since he is quitting. This makes me sad. Alex is a great teacher and an awesome dude :) Best of luck to him in the future and once again thank you so much for an enjoyable class and a great semester.

Evolution of the Dunkin' Donuts wikipedia article

Alright, so originally I had chosen 4 article to edit in class and in the end I only stayed with one of those topics and chose 3 all new ones. Dunkin' Donuts was one of the new ones. When I first started editing the Dunkin' Donuts wikipedia article I thought it would be easy to come upwith information since there are so many products DD creates... there had to be something missing! Boy was I wrong...

In my first edit I decided to update the company information on the right of the page. I added information about the headquarter location, updated information about the number of customers served each day in how many locations, and finally I noticed that the sales revenue figure listed was completed oudated. I fixed that right up. These were minor edits but overall they are important to have on the article because I feel that this might be the type of information someone comes to the wiki article to find.

A week later I got a great idea to create a new section of the article titled "featured products". It was a great idea in theory, but the wikipedia community did not take well to my second edit. In this section I created a bulleted list of all the coffee products DD offers. What I thought was great detailed information about the products the community thought was a sales pitch and rebelled. Yes, I got the information off of the DD webpage which made it slightly biased but I was under the impression that I could write whatever I wanted on the article, thats the point of a wiki! Wrong, upon checking the article a few days later I went to the DD article and found a message asking the community to fix what I had written. Also I got a message in my talk that says, "Descriptions of DD's products in Dunkin Donuts have an advertising tone and have been tagged as such. These need to be presented in a more neutral POV." How rude! Basically I was scared and I hated wikipedia at that moment. I didnt want to sign back in and have people watch wat I edit, I felt shunned from the wikipedia community!

Ok this is an exaggeration but I was definitely upset. I would have edited the section immediately, but I had to wait a week to make it count for class. A week passed and I went back to the article to find that someone else already edited my work. I was mad, but they did a great job. Therefore, I had to come up with a new third edit to the article. Although I did not get to edit my work, I did add one more piece of information to the "featured products" section. I wrote that DD currently has 52 varieties of donuts, thats a lot of donuts! Also, in the trivia section I added a link to the Dunkin' Donuts Center in Providence Rhode Island because although the article talked a great deal about the center they did not provide a link to the cite. Lastly, I added information about DD franchises in the history section that listed off the number of franchise locations in the US, Canada, and around the world.

Overall, this article caused me the most amount of problems with the wikipedia community. Their immediate reation to what I wrote shows that there are some people out there that take their wiki very seriously, which is great, but it definitely scared me out of wanting to edit articles ever again. However, even though they showed they did not approve of what I wrote, no one deleted my work, all they did was go in and make it more objective, which I appreciated. This was definitely my most interesting article to edit in that I truly got to see the inner workings and passion some people have for keeping Wikipedia up to date and current. Maybe next time I edit an article I wont sign in so people cannot track my work though...

Dunkin' Donuts, last wikipedia edit... ever?

Horray! this is the last edit that I need to to do for Dunkin' Donuts as well as for buad477!! I think that it is safe to say that this may also be my last wiki edit ever. This is because I have found that in order to edit a page it is necessary to have a great deal of knowledge on a topic to add meaningful information that the community will approve of. I just dont like the pressure of finding things to write about...

That said, I went onto the Dunkin Donuts wikipedia article the other day and found that the community did not approve of what I wrote for my last edit. Apparently it was worded too much like and advertisement and that was not ok. I thought you could write whatever you wanted but apparently not. My bad. Soooo for this edit I was going to go back and change what I had previously written to make it sound objective rather than in favor of Dunkin' Donuts. However, I had to wait a week since my last edit (because those are the class rules) and when I logged on today I found that someone else had already gone in and changed what I wrote. Surprisingly they did not just delete it, rather they too the time to make it unbiased. Im glad someone did not delete my work, but they totally took my wiki edit idea!! ugh. I had to find something else to write and here is what I came up with:

In the "featured products" section (the one I created, yay) I added the sentence "Dunkin' Donuts currently has 52 varieties of donuts". I found this fact on the DD website and I thought that it was just a little fact that was somewhat interesting to know. Also, I just wanted to add more to the section I made, bragging rights I guess...

Next, in the trivia section the article talks about how there is a Dunkin Donuts Center in Providence, Rhode Island. Since I live in Massachusetts I've actually been to the DD Center and it's really nice. However, in this little blurb of the center nowhere does it mention the actual website to get information on concerts and what not at the center. Therefore, I added this sentence, "The website for the Dunkin' Donuts Center can be found here" followed with a link to the website. I thought that this would be convenient.

Lastly, I noticed that throughout the wiki article and on all the webpages I found when searching for Dunkin' Donuts there was alwasy mentionings of their franchise opportunities and I started to wonder just how many DD's there were. I looked up this information, found it and put it in the history section of the wiki article (I figured this was the best place to put it since it could be considered history eventually...). The sentence I added was this: "Currently, there are 5,505 Dunkin' Donuts franchises in the United States, 79 in Canada, and 1,856 throughout the rest of the world." As of right now this information is correct, however, I am willing to bet that this will change within the next few weeks since a company as large as Dunkin' Donuts seems to always be growing.

Well there it is, my last wikipedia edit for this article, for this class, forever! I understand the reason why we did this exercise and it really did help me in understanding the process and importance of wikis, however, the overall editing process was somewhat stressful. Unless you are a highly knowledgeable individual on a particular topic it is difficult to find information that is incorrect and also to find information that is correct and missing. But that's not importnat anymore as this project is now completed and over. Stay tuned for my summary of the evolution of the Dunkin' Donuts wikipedia article coming up possibly tomorrow.


Now that the stiuqxela challenge is over I dont have anything to put here anymore :(

Evolution of the Sunsilk Wikipedia article

Although I did not create the wikipedia article on Sunsilk, I certailing was the main contributor of content to the article. I came up with the idea to edit this article from doing a project in another marketing class where me and a partner gave a presentation on the Sunsilk brand and their marketing strategies. I realize that wikipedia is not the most accurate source, but it definitely helps, and when I saw that there was basically no information on Sunsilk I saw it as an opportunity as an article to edit for this class.

In my first edit to the article I provided a little background information about the brand including when it was lauched and where. Although the article has only been around since January 2007, this little paragraph of information that I added more than doubled the size of the article.

Following my ouline, my second article edit gave a detailed explaination of Sunsilk's old marketing strategy. I created a heading section just for this additional information and went to town. I used the same method for my third and final edit to this article by adding another heading titled "new campaign" where I went into great detail of Sunsilk's new "get hairapy" campaign that they are currently running. I talked about the target demographs, the types of advertising used and even talked about features of their campaign website.

I definitely dominated this topic, but I did so by adding relevant, important information about Sunsilk that I feel anyone can benefit from reading about (as long as they are looking for information specifically about Sunsilk of course!). ALl the information I added was reasearched and then put into my own words, unless it is a company slogan or campaign motto. Through the duration of my edits I was the only one who added content of any type to the page and only after my final edit did someone else come in and put their own touch on the topic. And, even when someone else did come in and make edits, all they did was correct mys pelling errors and make it a little more gramatically correct. I think I can live with this! If anything I am embarassed that I made spelling errors for the world to see! Overall I really enjoyed editing this article and I definitely feel as though my edits will be well recieved by the general wikipedia community. Only time will tell through more edits how my information will be taken.

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.

Evolution of Medfield Wikipedia article

Overall, this was a fairly easy article to edit since I knew quite a bit about Medfield,MA because this is where I am from. As most articles about locations are, this one was already very detailed and thorough which made it necessary for me to really think about what was important about the town. My first edit was an addition to points of interest and is a critical piece of information that I was surprised to find was missing from the article.

Although no one deleted any of my content and only edited the format of the external liks I provided, I did go ahead and delete someone else's addition in my second edit. The reason I did this was the information they added was ridiculous and stated that Uber Jason was a notable resident in the town. In this same post I also took out some links in the page where people can link a word mentioned to another wikipedia article. I found a link to the word "books" which was just silly since I think most people reading this know what books are and do not need an distracting link to take away from the information in the article.

On what was supposed to be my big edit to the article I messed up and did the edits within a week of my previous edits. So stupid. Regardless, the extra edits I did make were excellent if I do say so myself. In this edit I added a bunch of information to the article in three different sections. The topics I added were the towns that Medfield bordered, I added some information to the history to make it a little more factual and significant, and then finally I added a sentence or two on Medfield State Hospital in the trivia section.

Finally, in my last edit I added information about in the education section of the article. What I added was the address of each of the different schools in the town. I blogged about this but going back to the wiki article I just realized that I did not sign in to make this edit. Once again, I messed up. I cannot correct it now, but the edit that is mine is the one titled "02:08, 9 April 2007 64.80.192.54 (Talk) (→Education)". Sorry about that.

Overall, even though this is a very active article for being edited, no one deleted or changed any of the information I added (except for the format of the links). I am very surprised by this and I am surprised at my self for coming up with enough quality information to add to this article that would be accepted by the general public. Also, in editing this article, I noticed that there was another individual who was editing the page with a user name of kylejtod who I am almost 100% sure is a guy that I graduated with. Perhaps he is doing the same project, or maybe he is just a passionate wikipedia editor...

Side note...

I wanted to mention that I thought the demonstration done in class on Wednesday was extremely helpful, at least for me. Although i post on my blog pretty often, it is really easy to do and not frightening. As for creating a webpage, now thats scary to me. Sophomore year all business students were require to take ACCT160 and 261 where some of our assignments consisted of creating our own webpage through our UDel accounts (I dont remember how we did it though). I liked the two classes but certainly not the html parts, it just seemed to go right over my head and as soon as that secton of the course was over I quickly erased all html coding information out of my head. So, when we started talking about it in class yesterday it was a good refresher course and having someone come up in front of the class and give it a try eased my nerves. Html isnt that bad and I do think that anyone could do it :)