By now I’ve almost done with my whole assignment on Wikipedia.
As is suggested by Danny, we can either choose 3 articles which need simple improvement or focus on one article that need various polishments such as formatting, checking spelling and grammar, translating etc. He also suggests that we select the articles listed under Help Out in the Community Portal. However, I plan to work on an article other than those. I asked Danny if it’s okay to do so, and luckily he said it fine as long as I do enough work and really learn something during the process.
This following is the link to the article which I want to work on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kira-Kira
Kira-Kira is a young adult novel which I have read in versions of both English and Chinese. That’s one of my favorite novel for teens! In Wikipedia, however, there’s only a plot summary for it and there’s no reference. Based on my understanding to this book as well as the privilege to get access to Chinese version, I planned to do the following improvements:
1.Polish the existing plot by fixing spelling and grammar, updating more detailed information as well as adding links.
2.Create new lead sections: Introduction of the author (I have a photo-copy of an interview of the author on the Chinese-version book, and I plan to try my best to translate it into English); Background information of the story (the special situation of Japanese-Americans); The main themes (I’ll summary by myself and might quote some paragraphs that are related to the themes).
3.List a series of questions to readers(especially young generations) to reflect.
4.Translate some paragraphs into Chinese by my own to make it bilingual :) (I wonder if it’s necessary)
Although I haven’t received the feedback from my TA yet, I was so curious and eager that I could not wait a single time to design my own page on Sandbox, which is definitely a cool invention. People use it to work on certain topic with his own ideas while without disturbing others’ works. I haven’t yet sure about how you can let your distribution appear on the real page instead of the sandbox, but this does not really worry me as the sandbox is good enough that it looks exactly like a real page. I just enjoy the process and appreciate it very much :)
However, when I was about to carry out my plans on Wiki, things were just so different. First of all, it disappointed my that the internet is too powerful than what I imagined. I got a study guide listing a series of questions from the paper-version book which I had planned to add to the page as a new head section, but after a broad search on the internet, I just found a free and same version on line! My goodness... This meant that there was no more need to list them as a new section but I could just add a new link named Study Guide under the section of References. Luckily, although there are a lot of interviews with the author, I didn’t find any as specific to the topic Kira-Kira as the one I have, although it’s in Chinese. So I translated it into English and added a new section called Interview with the author by using the notation “== ==”(Actually I also added a subheading using “=== ===”). Another thing that surprised me is that when I learned about how to insert an image, it turned out to be a huge amount of steps. Not only do they ask about where and how you get the image to make sure it is legal, you are also responsible for any further use of the image to Wiki and even elsewhere. I was really moved by this because it can indeed enhance people’s awareness of law. And such rules can also help to put an end to the abuse of copied work.
To sum up, what I have done so far are as follows:
1. Expand the general information prior to head sections by adding new information and form new paragraphs. Also add new wikilinks.
2. Fix several grammar mistakes in the former plot summary, the majority of which are false of the tense. Split the summary into two parts and name them separately as two subheadings.
3. Translate and new heading, as mentioned above.
4. Add two new images.
5. Add new references.
By the way, the key feature about this Wikiproject is actually to understand and work on SC(source code). You need to go through several notations and learn about what changes they actually make before you start your work so that you can make everything neat and systematic, and which is most important,it works!
I’m running out of time writing this...... Anyway, I love this assignment, as well as this SLOG I’m just working on. It was a challenge, but I see it as a treatment now. Although I’m confident that I will get a high mark on the assignment, that’s not where my efforts pay off. Again, I just ENJOY the process so much.
Ps. Things to highlight for today’s lecture: We talked about binary system which computers are based on and compared it with the decimal system that is commonly use in our anathematical computation. We multiply each digit of a integer by the appropriate power of ten to get its value, divide it by the base ,which is ten, and round it down when we drop a digit from the right and multiply it by the base ten if we add a zero to the right. The binary system works exact the same except for it is based on two instead of ten. Every time you add a zero to the right of a binary digit, it is doubled. And that’s the underlying language of computer. Interestingly, we humans always like to make things easy, as 5897 is just 5897, while computers seems only like complex things. I learned in the lecture that a decimal number as simple as 40 is represented 101000 in binary system, let alone 5897! Well, maybe that’s why we invented such a complex and power machine, so as to stay lazy......
And which interests me most, we learned to define a term today, in the middle of which the same term just appears again. This means as long as you meet with this term, you should go back to the initial stage of the definition and do the orders again. This conveys the big idea of recursion, which, as Danny pointed out when I asked him after class, is going to be extremely useful when we work out the paper-folding puzzle. Aha, did I talk about of the puzzle so often? That’s where my main interests focus:)
Today’s Dr,Racket is pretty easy. List, structure and map, as long as you figure out the meaning of these functions and get used to them, then you are done. So far I got all my quizzes full marks. I think I’m getting smarter thanks to my paying fully attention during the lecture. That really helps. Also it works with me to prepare beforehand by watching the videos.
We talked about the term test next week and I’ll focus on it very soon. I guess I’ll write a summary some days later in the blog too.
Finished for today! Cheers!
