Uzanto:Seabuckthorn

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Education is the Inculcation of the Unnecessary into the Ignorant by the Incompetent – Oscar Wilde

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Sea Buck Thorn
Chinese National Drink

Beginner's problems To be or not to be, that's the dilemma of an amateur I experienced when I gave a pretended pensive look of Archimedes at my first article. Writing is really simple, you think and think till you get blood droplets on your forehead. Ok I agree that's way beyond melodramatic. Joining wikipedia as an editor is a tryst with writing for me. I have been an avid reader of wikipedia but I never thought of contributing to it. Partly attributed to my atrocious writing skills and partly to lack of knowledge about editing wikipedia. But somehow I am here. Call it serendipity if you may. I visited user pages of few other very active wikipedian editors. Humbled by their contribution and dedication as a volunteer, I felt I am terribly late in jumping the bandwagon. Few editors I visited appear to be here since its inception. All this convinced me of a bumpy road ahead. I added two very short articles to Wikipedia. Needing a lot of improvement, they are far from the benchmark I have set for myself in content quality. The standard of articles should be that of featured articles. Predominant in this touchstone is the simplicity of language with which featured articles are written. Easy to follow, read and enjoy that is the style I want to strive for and which eludes me always. When I created my first article, I attempted to know exactly how an article is created. Even such rudimentary stuff appeared daunting to me. I found the answer on yahoo answers where a fellow wikipedian administrator had explained the steps in a very simple but elegant language. Having written around a thousand words consisting of three paragraphs I created my first article without the lead section of the article. As expected the article got flagged immediately with obvious remark of 'lead missing'. After a gap of few days, I checked my watchlist. Major changes that had taken place were of 'disambiguation'. Technically I could not understand how the markups relating to disambiguation work but I knew about its purpose as a user, that is when you search for a topic and you are redirected to an article of the same name which is not the one you searched for then you follow the disambiguation page to get what you want. Disambiguation as a user consisted of hardly one percent of my clicks on wikipedia as a user. But the focus as a wikipedia editor is more towards the format, 'formatting' rather, than the content itself for which a wikipedia is so renowned. As a novice I understand that there are common pitfalls in thinking and perception that an amateur has, still this is what I feel right now. Formatting reference list, adding disambiguation links are the most coveted edits among my fellow wikipedians. The focus to content per se is comparatively less. My experience has been that of an applicant who is standing in a law court and being judged for his actions, not as a participant of a community of sef-driven volunteers who strive to make knowledge free for all. This lack of attention and vigilance to content has somewhat undermined the credibility of wikipedia as a source of information in my opinion. I feel like there is a hidden rat-race going on for greater edit counts, a novel manifestation of narcissism that I came across.