Editing a Wikitravel page was a little more involved than I thought it would be. Many things were a bit tricky in doing this project such as remembering important details about the places or activities in the area, making sure that the edits were in the correct format the manual of style asks for, and using the site in general.
Clearwater, FL is not my hometown but it is a city that I am quite familiar with and have visited many times. So, when I chose it as my topic I thought it would be easy to list places. However, I quickly realized that all I knew was the broad idea. I had to go and look up most of the addresses, and phone numbers. I was also a bit fuzzy on the hours they were open and the prices so I had to research some of that also. Another thing that was hard to do was to include information that would pertain to all age groups. Whenever I visited these places it would mostly be with my friends and family so I never really paid attention to what amenities if any, that they provided for small children or senior citizens.
It was also harder to follow the manual of style than I thought it would be. When I started inserting links I realized that many violated the style. Not sure if including the links for airlines went against the link guidelines, I decided to leave them out entirely and just list the names of the airlines. I also had trouble linking pages so I decided to just insert hyperlinks of the websites of the places I mentioned. Furthermore, when editing in the box there is no spell check so I decided to write everything in a word document and then copy and paste it to make sure that my spelling was at least correct.
Lastly, the site in general was a little tricky at times. I had to take my time and really pay attention to where I was clicking. One of my problems was that I kept clicking on the wrong "add listing" link and would end up inserting something under the wrong heading. Also, I was unable to edit the very top of the page. The first heading seemed like a little introduction to the city and I wanted to add information like how large it was and what the the most recent population size was, but whenever I clicked the link it would just take me to a box which edited the section below it. I was not sure if there is just some special way to edit it that I do not know about or if the original person who created the article made it so it could not be changed.
For the most part however, the problems were minimal when I took my time. It is a very organized site and there are many pages that provide help and suggestions so, most of the problems I encountered I was able to overcome easily. It is not until one actually tries to edit information in these articles that they realize how structured and complex that some aspects of the website can be. Definitely not a piece of cake like I thought it would be.
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