Wiki-versation blog post: Final Entry

Over the course of the project, few changes were made with respect to the particular section of the Gorillaz music group article with which I was concerned. Their live performance section remained untouched for a long while until I pushed hard and made further alterations tonight, resulting in a small wiki-war between myself and another user. Throughout the experiment, I used different techniques when altering the article, ranging from including definite fact, approximated fact, opinion, and complete fabrication in order to generate a variety of different responses from users. My first comment slighted the group's performance at the Coachella Valley Music Festival, and was quickly removed thereafter, by angry fans I presume. Interestingly enough, the user who realtered my posts most frequently, pheeps21, provided new layers of insight about happenings in the crowd at the music festival performance on which I commented, but also got his facts wrong on occasion as well. The song "Superfast Jellyfish" has not yet been released as a single in the US or in the UK, and his comment concerning frontman Damon Albarn of '90s alternative band blur was both contextually inaccurate and grammatically incorrect. I'm also not sure I saw any people in jellyfish costumes at the festival, but decided against altering his text concerning that, as I might have missed them in the sea of people attending that night. This project has taught me a lot about the truth and the fallacy that is so easily attainable through wikipedia, and how it is as much about fan-service as it is about accurate information, at least in the case of music-based pages such as this one. It is very much a democratic vessel for information, and very much not a democratic vessel for opinion. Regardless of intended use, the wiki concept is a great right that requires great responsibility on the part of its participants.