Editing Wikipedia Stubs - Canadienne Cattle

These past couple weeks in my ALES class we have been exploring the world of copyright, referencing and the reliabilty of resources. To provide a hands-on experience, we were required to edit a Wikipedia stub; an article with little or limited information. I chose to edit the one on Canadienne cattle, because there was very little written on it and I'm a cattle girl, so I enjoy learning more about breeds, especially the only one developed in Canada! You can click here to see the article and learn more about Canada's dairy breed. My classmate, Rosie, also edited a WIkipedia article on a cattle breed. In her blog she discusses the difficulty of finding reliable sources on Gelbvieh cattle and her journey of learning how to edit a Wikipedia article. Both breeds have interesting stories with their history and their existence in Canada. Canadienne cattle were first brought over in the 1600's when the French were colonizing modern-day Quebec. They developed into a hardy breed to survive the harsh Canadian environment and to produce milk efficiently. Today they are an endangered breed that breed associations are actively working at increasing their popularity and population.

Original Canadienne cattle stub
(Andria Carlyon, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadienne_cattle>
retrieved March 22 2012)

This picture is of the original article, and as you can see there is only a short paragraph about the breed and two references. It does have a good picture of a Canadienne heifer that gives the viewer a good representation of the breed's appearance.

New, updated Canadienne cattle stub
(Andria Carlyon, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadienne_cattle>
retrieved March 23 2012)

For my article, I added more headings to sort the information and provided some more references to give the information more reliability, one was a peer-reviewed article about the genetic differences between Canadienne cattle and other dairy breeds. If someone reading my article was not very knowledgeable about Canadienne cattle, it would quite easy to have errors go unnoticed and used by readers. I could have changed the dates about when the breed got heritage status, or stated that they did not exist on any ranches outside of Quebec and because the errors would have been minimal, they could be looked over. This could happen with any other articles and stubs on Wikipedia, either intentionally or not.
Therefore, I do not think that Wikipedia should ever be used as a resource when writing papers or articles. It can be used to gain a quick, basic understanding of the subject, but the information should not be used in the writing. The same information should be found on from other sources that are reputable if the Wikipedia article had the correct, error-free material.