User:412timothy/Report

= My Overall Wikipedia Experience =

Background / Context
Hello fellow Wikipedians!

My name is Tim Joo and as of February 2022, I am a Senior at the University of Washington - Seattle double majoring in both Informatics and Communications.

To give context to my Wikipedia experience, I took the Wiki Education platform within a 10-week Online Communities 300 level course. Our goal was to get a better understanding of online platforms, how they are used, and how they bring an overall sense of community. The platform provided a clear structure to do so in an educational environment. It had weekly objectives, goals, and tasks that were needed to be done to move along through the article and also the course.

What did I Do?
The article I chose is about Stephen Curry from the Golden State Warriors. I was recommended by my Professor to avoid such high-profile articles, but in my mind, I was thinking “now what’s the fun in that?”. I intended to update this article not only as a challenge to the Wikipedia community but also as a way to gain perspective and insight on the hurdles that can come with adding more information to a more popular page.

What Did I Learn?
For topics that actually matter… it can be nearly impossible to update articles

In all honesty, I could have chosen an easier Wikipedia page to tackle. To give context, I chose to dive deeper into the Stephen Curry Page because it was a topic I was interested in. I did not think it would be a problem and I was extremely excited to dive deeper. However, there was an abundance of challenges that I wasn’t expecting to be roadblocks in my project.

Researching and Adding is Challenging

Finding topics for new additions was too difficult to do. When looking through Talk:Stephen Curry/GA1, a good article review of the article, I found the needed edits and revisions were more towards grammar, spelling, and overall wording rather than actual content issues and fixes that are needed.

For my approach, I wanted to add more than just those little fixes so I decided to provide more of a summary section for Steph’s NBA Career as a whole thus far that someone can look at quickly and reference if need be. This is because the article is just a dense wall of text that no one will actually want to read through.

When finishing and publishing the article, it was almost immediately taken down by a fellow editor, stating that “many of these points already in the lead, don't need another "sub-overview"; feel free to integrate any missing info”. I can see their perspective on this, however, it does not solve the issue of many articles on Wikipedia being dense walls of text that I was aiming to fix. This leads well into my next point.

For Someone New… it’s Incredibly Daunting

As someone new, it is extremely overwhelming to be going through the process of not only understanding the platform but also understanding the culture of Wikipedia Editors. This was something that I feel was overwhelming on top of understanding how to actually source, write, and publish an article.

My Recommendations
Implement a Community Culture Section of Wikipedia Education

An easy counterargument for this is “you just need to experience and be a part of this”. However, inclusivity should be the key to any online community. Directly avoiding this is not providing new users the adequate information to make a difference in Wikipedia.

For instance, I was lucky enough to have my professor and TA warn me about choosing popular articles however if I did not have them I would not have known this as it is never clearly represented in the course at all. It is just something a new user goes into blind which is not fair for them. Adding this section will help bring more insight to the users.

Readability Needs to be a New Focus

At the moment, Wikipedia is full of walls of text with links that feel both meaningless and purposeless. Not only in my Stephen Curry article, but across the board on all articles. The purpose isn’t towards making the content more digestible, but it’s just focused on getting content out there.

This inherently limits who will come to the website, but also who will actually take the time to read it. If anyone sees a giant wall of text, the immediate instinct is to skim it, look past it, or simply just not read it. A new shift toward readability, would help the usability of the website grow immensely while growing the user base immensely.

A Refresh in a Website Redesign

The actual UI of the website is so incredibly outdated. With no refresh in a UI, Wikipedia is limiting the User Demographic to only people who are used to this and not to the next genreation of Internet Users. Website design has come a long way since the early 2000s and this current design is preventing new people from engaging in the platform.

The Wiki Education platform is a good starting point to reference. The overall UI looks more modern than that of the actual website. This distinction causes confusion for new users as one is more readable, understandable, and overall easier to digest while the other feels like a relic from the start of the internet as a whole. A new UI would help bring more users to read as well as help edit the articles as well.

What Would I Change or Add About My Experience?
Pick an Easier Article & Do More Research

Tackling popular articles is not fun… Although it was a good experience there can simply just not be enough new information out there to actually help the page out. If I did more research on what topics I wanted to cover, this definitely would have helped in the long run.

At the same time though, that shouldn’t be the expectation amongst new users. They should be able to just pick a new article and have fun in this community. Give new input, topics, or anything that would help a Wikipedia article as that is the fundamentals of this entire website’s existence.

In the end, I do know that I gave it my all within the scope of my project. Now would I recommend editing Wikipedia Articles for my friends? Of course not. The UI is confusing, the culture is tough to break into, and its purpose is simply not modern enough for new people to come into.