User:Forestjohnson

Hello. In accordance with Wikipedia's recommended editor policies, I'm going to provide some information about where I'm coming from.

Student

So far, I am only editing wikipedia because I was told to do so in a college class.

I understand that editing Wikipedia is hard to do correctly. It is an exercise in online collaboration with people you will probably never see face to face. In our digitally connected world, that's an important skill to have.

The gung-ho editing attitude in this class seems likely to produce one-off edits that are instantly reverted, mostly because they will violate WP:MEDRS.

I have a vested interest in passing this class. I hope to do so without making bad edits that appeal to the class instead of the wikipedia project.

Assignment

I was assigned to work on a wikipedia page that had to do with food and nutrition. I chose Aspartame because I wanted to work on a page that had epistemological conflicts. I'd heard a lot of conflicting information about aspartame, from the scaremail hoaxes to allegations of regulatory wheeling and dealing to a general consensus of safety by the scientific/regulatory community, and I wanted to learn more about how these conflicts are resolved, who argues what, and if possible, find out what is actually going on.