The Dyspraxia Wikipedia Page

A place to talk about your experience of living with Dyspraxia

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arthmelow
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Posts: 69
Joined: Thu Feb 16, 2006 10:12 pm

The Dyspraxia Wikipedia Page

Post by arthmelow »

Come'on! It needs some serious editing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyspraxia

For those who haven't come across the loveliness of wikipedia.org yet, its an online encyclopedia that *anyone* can edit. It has safeguards to prevent vandalism on certain topics and on some pages it works really damn well. But it only works when there are enough people to edit a page to make it really good. If an article is good enough, it can become a featured article, which is my aim with the dyspraxia page.

At the moment its littered with unreferenced statements: some we know are true and just need sources to finish off, and some are incorrect: eg

"Dyspraxics are usually of average or above-average intelligence." ( we know there is an equal spread of dyspraxic people across the population, and its comments like that I think encourage prejudice about dyspraxia )

Basically all you need to do, is click on the link I've given you and then click on the "edit" above the section you want to change. And don't worry about being drastic, if it is wiki keeps a record of all the changes so they can be reversed if needed.

I've found the research pages on the dyspraxia foundation website most useful for finding citations... you guys probably know loads of other links to use.

Just to help, below are the wiki guidelines on style and citations:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Guide_to_layout
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources

I've done a little bit, but I'm going to get a bit more drastic soon enough! The talk page for dyspraxia shows my comments at the end.
Ruth
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Location: Reading

Post by Ruth »

right I'll go and have a loko it that - I remember reading it like last year or something so I'll cast a ritical eye over it now, not sure I feel qualified to change anything though!!! :-#
robyn

Post by robyn »

I had a nosy on that site, and although I cant be bothered editing (to technical for me) there were several things that were said as generalisation bout dyspraxia that bugs me. Im v over sensitive to lights, sound and smells, but the site suggests that only dyspraxics with autistic conditoions can be affected in this way, and/or have panic attacks from this. It says that dyspraxia is commonly misdiagnosed as adhd, without mentioning the correlation between them (I have both). It also says that dyspraxics take sarcasm literally (I def dont, and have a v sarcastic sense of humor), and that we generally have poor social skills, which although I understand is an area of problem for some, it never has been for me and after speaking online forums etc I havent seen it as a general problem, just an occasional one, and often only in certain areas. Its also a very pessimistic info site, it doesnt give a very real overview of the variation between peoples conditions, and many of the different positives people find from dyspraxia. It doesnt give a very real view.
Daniel
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Location: London

Post by Daniel »

I don't have time to read the entry, but any attempt at describing dyspraxia does need to take into account the individual differences each person encounters. There are few hard and fast rules but there are several common themes, and anyone with dyspraxia could experience any number of them. Then, similiarly individual in nature are the links to related disorders, of which dyspraxia can show some symptoms of without it being a whole secondary disorder. It's a complicated pick-n-mix sort of a thing.

Thus I suppose what I'm trying to say is that the main symptoms should be described along with those symptomatic of related disorders, but that any individual dyspraxic could experience any number of them and to any level of severity.
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