Want to know more about Akon? Look it up on Wikipedia. Want to know why Penn students throw toast during football games? Quakerpedia can help with that.
The Undergraduate Assembly Student Life Committee’s Quakerpedia will serve as a one-stop resource guide to all facets of Penn.
The UA introduced the project in 2007 and is currently looking for a designer for the site, as well as students to write different components of the online manual.
College sophomore Andrew Lum, the UA member in charge of the project, said the group’s goal is to create a resource for freshmen to gain knowledge about student organizations — “so that students don’t have to trudge through the current cluttered PennPortal to find information on something.”
Lum emphasized that Quakerpedia’s purpose will be to make students’ lives easier.
“We are taking information that already exists and making it more accessible to the students,” he said.
Quakerpedia will also contain information about Penn traditions.
“I’m shocked to find out that some people still don’t know why we say ‘a toast to dear old Penn,’” Lum said. These traditions “are such a vital part of our culture that people should know about it.”
He also said concerns over potential inaccuracy and misuse of information have been addressed.
“We don’t want another Juicy Campus,” Lum said. “This web site will be available to anyone and anyone can view it, but to make edits we are going to have people sign up for accounts.”
Quakerpedia accounts will not be associated with students’ PennKeys, according to Lum, but will be used to verify that Quakerpedia members are members of the Penn community. This will create a “security blanket” in case anyone attempts to intentionally misuse the site.
Many Penn students agreed that Quakerpedia would have made freshman year easier, whether they came from Philadelphia or somewhere outside of the United States.
“The downside of coming from Philly and going to a school in Philly is thinking that you know everything [about Penn],” College sophomore and Philadelphia-native Haley Pearlstein said. “But with a web site like Quakerpedia, I would have been able to learn a lot of things that I didn’t know about Penn.”
College sophomore Malcolm Geddes, who attended high school in Canada and had never been to Penn before being accepted, stressed that an online guide like Quakerpedia would have made a “big difference” during his freshman year.
“It would have provided a visual, as well as an informative context for me to have an idea of what to expect,” Geddes said.
Although College sophomore Jonathan Goodman’s brother, who graduated in the spring, taught him about the humanities at Penn, Goodman said he is interested in the sciences.
“He couldn’t really teach me about the buildings and opportunities that were available to me,” Goodman said, adding that Quakerpedia would have helped.
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