 What I think Wikipedia really stands out to me is that as I went through school it was always a place where I could look up things. So I have to benefit of being able to read English, Wikipedia, Danish, Wikipedia, Norwegian, Wikipedia and sometimes German Wikipedia too. And Wikipedia was always basically the savior when it was a word I didn't know, a term I needed to look up. Yeah that's probably it. So we all know that our students are using Wikipedia and we're all using it ourselves. So I think that being familiar with it is really important and it's a really important part of information literacy and digital skills and just understanding of the resources that we and our students are using. It's been really a really interesting and exciting experience for me because it's not something I've been involved with before but as a librarian I think it's something really important to get our students using Wikipedia and contributing to it especially in medicine where it's often a first port of call for people for finding medical information. So contributing to that is really exciting because the students can actually before they are doctors they can actually contribute to the medical knowledge base. You've kind of contributed to public knowledge in some way even if it's just repackaging knowledge it's already there but you're making it accessible and it's a really good exercise in critical thinking and that's something that's you know sort of the ultimate skill you learn in an undergraduate degree and and I was looking at it learning to look at an article and think how could this be improved and I think and then finally like as a student it's a really good opportunity and it's a really motivating thing to be able to do to relay the knowledge you've learned from lectures and exams it hasn't really been relevant outside of lectures and exams but to see how it's relevant to the real world and to see how you can contribute and use your use your knowledge to contribute. I think what I found surprising was how easy it was like the visual editor was really good I thought I'd have to do a lot of like html coding or something um but it was really easy to just put it in and do the references and stuff um yeah and I suppose the other thing was how satisfying it was when it was done like I thought you know comparing again to academic essays like you send them off you get the grade back you look at the feedback and you really never really read them again whereas um I suppose knowing that people are coming back to this article and finding it useful uh is really like gratifying and you're just yeah yeah I don't know it was fun. It remains a massive resource for people to access and understand history um and yet the history that people access on Wikipedia is often very different from the history that you would access in a university department there's very little social history there's very little women's history and gender history a history of women of people of colour or queer history um and the only way that's going to be overcome is if people from those disciplines start actively engaging in Wikipedia and trying to correct those imbalances because you know it is I'm sure people are fascinated by what sort of bullet was used in X sort of gun um but I feel the social potential of Wikipedia to change people's perspectives on the world uh really lies in correcting imbalances in their representation of the world and that's a very long sentence with far too many long words but basically what I'm trying to say is that people should try and make Wikipedia accurately represent the diversity of the world around us and the diversity of history and the diversity of historical scholarship yeah so I think there's definitely been a shift in terms of how people have viewed Wikipedia so I think while it's still not widely cited as um its own source for information then I think it's really been gaining a huge amount of credibility in terms of a starting point and a lot of the references that are contained within these articles are really reputable science publications and journals but I think one of the strengths of Wikipedia is that it's making this accessible to a much broader and a much wider audience so in terms of having that really good starting point then it is a lot of people's first call now when it comes to learning about a new topic and sort of highlights or pinpoints some of the relevant literature yeah I suppose on another another dimension that I suppose is um you know what we want a modern graduate to be um we're moving from a modern graduate thinking about um sourcing information to Jenny mentioned earlier it's this idea of critical analysis and critical thinking so Wikipedia has sort of I think moved into this area of being a useful information source in its own right um there's a sense of increasing trustworthiness in that source I think perhaps a lot of the lack of trust in the past was that oh anybody could go in and change it and then it wouldn't be true anymore but I think um it's it's kind of clear that there are such strong gay keepers on articles that that tends to be reliable source so we're moving into a sphere now where Wikipedia as a as a useful source and a reliable source uh is more and more emerging to be the first step students go to before they go on to perhaps integrating that information with other information using that as a leap for other and so on so I just think it's becoming more established as a aspect an aspect of resource that students use in their in their education I also do think that where then Wikipedia has a really good space is that academia focuses way too little on how to communicate communicate you know world-leading research to the layman people I love to rap that is why everyone I that's why I love Wikipedia I've always loved it like you know you click on one page and then five hours later you're still in like you know you start out like a world war two history and you end up in like I don't know how proteins are breaking down in your body and you're like I don't know how I got there