Brittnay's Blog for "The Digital Past"

I chose Adolf Hitler as my historical topic to judge Wikipedia.  I have read the majority of his page before and knowing that it was in depth, I thought it would be interesting to see any editing done, sources used, and the history of it all taking place by the volunteers of Wikipedia.

I clicked on sources, but what came on the screen said that the page was currently semi-protected and could only be edited by registered users.  I guess with some specific topics, one has to be registered with Wikipedia to edit anything.  I like how they made that possible because it limits who can actually edit things to make it “more reliable”.  Below that though, showed an html box that had all the text that made the page what it was; I recognized some of the codes in there.  And underneath that one is able to click a different heading of a section of the page to view the source, meaning that the html codes would just show up in the box.

I clicked on ‘View History’, and I automatically saw a lot of  text.  I tried to make out all the different meanings and abbreviations, and at first I didn’t get it, because I wasn’t used to seeing that side of Wikipedia.  After a few minutes though, I figured out what some of the abbreviations meant, like “cur”, “prev”, “talk”, “AWB”, and “contribs”, and also why some were significant.  What I found most interesting was that the Adolf Hitler page has more than 500 edits… that were still in the year of 2012!  I thought that was awesome, and the fact that everything was documented.  Scrolling through some of the edits, most of them were legitimate; I did not see too much spam, again probably do to the fact that the ones were are editing the page are registered users and not just hte general public of the internet.

The last thing I looked at was the earliest edit, which I think was the creation of the page:  3:09 am- November 15th, 2001.  And the at 11:55 am on November 18th, 2001 was when the page started using the format that has the little content box at the top.

Overall, I think this was cool.  This page specifically has so much editing and history that it is just a lot to look at and sift through.