User:7ommybo1228/Report

As a student majoring in Communication at the University of Washington, I am honored and grateful to have the opportunity to personally experience the content of writing Wikipedia and add more vitality to the topics I am interested in. For me before, I always tried to find a professional and reliable explanation on wikipedia when I encountered doubts that needed to be answered. In my concept, this website can best reflect the authenticity of a message, so it also makes me feel that it is almost impossible to participate in the work of editing information on wikipedia as a student. But under the guidance of Professor Champion, I have a more comprehensive understanding of my ability, this online community and my improved articles in the past few weeks.

Wikipedia is a web-based, multilingual free encyclopedia. All the information in the page should be neutral and true, and no prejudice or advertisement should be considered. This is unique. When we look forward to most other online community platforms, such as reddit and facebook, we will find that people don't have to be afraid that their published content contains information that may be incorrect or biased. But in the process of writing wikipedia, I must warn myself to be clearly aware of whether every sentence is true and not with my personal prejudice. For example, the topic of the article I chose was Hou Yaowen, a legendary crosstalk artist with great influence in China, but nothing I wrote showed my admiration and praise for him. This rule in wikipedia makes the data in its page more reliable, but at the same time, the professionalism of the rule makes the editing process more complicated.

People can have a Wikipedia page as an individual. An enterprise, a non-governmental organization or a brand can also own a Wikipedia page, but it is not so easy to get the approval of a page. Everyone has the ability to create or edit Wikipedia pages, but only a few people can successfully make their Wikipedia pages persist and survive the censorship process. This is another experience of mine. When I apply the utility model for early community joining taught by Professor Champion to wikipedia, I find the disadvantages of "anyone can create and edit". The third item mentioned in the utility model about joining the community, the cost side, reflects that wikipedia does not need troublesome steps to edit and participate in text changes. This may lead some people to tamper with existing articles or add untrue information at will, which will further bring more challenges to Wikipedia editors and auditors. They have to spend time making adjustments in these avoidable situations. In addition, the number of active editors in Wikipedia has been much less, but the number and length of its articles are still growing. This means that the remaining editors have too much work to do. In order to deal with this situation, I have come up with several different suggestions.

First of all, wikipedia can try to let professional reviewers have the function of leaving like marks and blocking changes to articles after checking them. Tagging an article with likes can make other editors aware of the quality of the content of the article. If the number of likes is enough, the webpage can enable the function of temporarily blocking the editing of the article. If the original editor of the article wants to modify a part, he needs the approval of the auditor to make the change. In this way, I believe that it can solve the problem that information is tampered with by some unprofessional people at will, and it can also reduce the auditor's participation in the audit process again and delete improper information if they have to. Secondly, wikipedia can ensure that people will bring effective help to this online community in the future by asking people to improve their personal information of accounts, and at the same time, when new users create accounts, they should strengthen reminding about the consequences of violating regulations, so that people can be more intuitively aware of their actions and enhance their sense of responsibility. In this way, it can increase the cost of people wanting to join this community, find out those who really want to help and shut out those who are irresponsible.

In order to enhance the interaction between individuals and the whole online community in wikipedia, I think wikipedia should strengthen the development of the four commitments I learned in class. As can be seen from the example of reddit given by the professor in class, people are willing to stay in the sub-reddit they are interested in because they can more or less feel their connection with others and the community. They may feel close to individual members within the community, or they may feel like a part of a community and want to fulfill its mission. These all belong to the category of commitment. These aspects are also reflected in platforms such as facebook and twitter. However, I think there are some identity-based and bonds-based commitments missing in Wikipedia, which will lead to people in the community not feeling connected with others. So I suggest that more discussion forums can be set up, and articles can be classified into different areas according to different topics, so that when others encounter difficulties, they don't just rely on experts on wikipedia. They can find people within the same topic area and ask for help.People can use this form to start a lot of discussions and even help wikipedia put forward better suggestions and changes. At the same time, it can also enhance the interaction between people in the community and new users, so that they can feel their existence more.

The above are my thoughts and suggestions reflecting on this experience. In addition, wikipedia has taught me how to choose good articles and make correct quotations, and how to avoid plagiarism or infringement of others' rights.