User:Abuckley3/Report

When beginning the Wikipedia assignments, I was coming in completely blind. I had used Wikipedia to gather basic information on topics, but never thought to contribute to pages or to create new pages. Wikipedia to me was more of an unreliable source, something that was there to give me a general overview of a subject that I was interested in. After finishing the Wikipedia assignments, I feel that my view on Wikipedia has changed drastically. I no longer see it as an unreliable source as I am now more familiar with the structure of articles and feel that I can identify a reliable one from an unreliable one.

The tutorials were very helpful in showing me this. Every tutorial, except for the final one, was extremely helpful and an easy walkthrough. The only issue with the final one for me was that it didn’t directly apply to taking our articles live, but Salt and Mako put out more content that made the transition a bit easier. After finishing the tutorials, it helped me get a sense of what Wikipedia was all about. Just the general understanding of Wikipedia’s mission helped me to understand and navigate the site better. Messages such as how to find reliable and unbiased sources gave me more faith in not only my ability to create articles but to trust the information that I was reading as well.

The instance when most students’ pictures were deleted from their articles because it violated one rule, or another really opened my eyes to see how well Wikipedia is regulated. By realizing how serious they site is about copyright infringement and how quickly they reacted showed the reliability of the site.

One thing that I struggled with coming into the assignments was not phrasing my article to sound like an advertisement. When I was choosing my article, I saw the notice that “some content might be written as an advertisement” on the page but I thought nothing of it at the time. I understood what the notice meant when it came time to write the article. Especially when writing articles for companies or specific brands you must pay close attention to your word choice. I tried to use as unbiased language as possible so that the article would not come off in a persuasive manner. It is difficult when speaking on product as you can pretty much only keep in the technical specs and not how they turn around and perform for the consumer. Even then you are walking a fine line as not enough information for the reader of the article. For example, a technical spec that I spoke about in my article is Hyperlite’s Nova core in their wakeboards. You can bring up Nova core, but chances are very low that a reader will know what that means. So, I added it makes the board lighter and faster than the other core options, but even then, that statement is verging on becoming an advertisement. Phrasing was probably my biggest struggle when doing the Wikipedia assignments as I’m sure it was for other students who wrote articles on brands or consumer products.

One thing the Wikipedia foundation could improve on is making a more user-friendly way to contribute. If it wasn’t for this class, then I probably never would have made a contribution to Wikipedia. Even if I had tried the method to contributing was a bit more complicated than I had expected. Perhaps require first time users to go through a tutorial on how to contribute to Wikipedia. Another thing they could do to improve is to articulate Wikipedia’s message of unbiased articles a bit better. That has always been my biggest concern when looking up information on Wikipedia is how reliable the article is. If Wikipedia was able to market how unbiased their articles are or show how they regulate the articles, then I would have had more trust for the site coming into the class. As I said above, after taking the class and going through the tutorials I have a greater respect for Wikipedia and feel confident that I can decipher good information in an article from the bad. Granted when I started writing my article almost every piece of information was out of date. That didn’t help with my trust for the site. The tutorials and my instructor were helpful in showing me how to write in a way that doesn’t go out of date. For example, when writing my “partners” section I had included a date, by removing the dates and including “notable partners have included”, it made the information more adaptable to change.

Wikipedia has the commitment side of things down. I don’t know if I’ll make a contribution as large as this assignment ever again, but now I feel committed to Wikipedia after all that I have learned. I feel comfortable enough to where if I see wrong information in an article, I am able to change it and find a reliable source to replace the poor information with. I am sure many others in the class feel the same way. When it comes to motivation, I think that that is an area that Wikipedia can improve in. When beginning to make edits it can be overwhelming as there are a lot of different methods to take in. I stand by my original theory for improving this in that making the tutorials mandatory for a first-time user will help them understand the way that Wikipedia works.

Wikipedia is unique to other sites in that it seems to be the same platform since the first day that I started using it. I could be wrong, but in my memory, Wikipedia has had the same look and layout forever. In my opinion, it is a little bland. Perhaps changing the layout of the site to look more like the WikiEdu dashboard could help with more user interaction. I know I would be more enticed to hit a large bright green edit button rather than the one that is in the basic black and white font.