User:Acforlando/sandbox

Final reflective essay
Throughout this Wikipedia assignment process, I have learned to be more inclusive when it comes to reviewing literature with an academic lens. Normally, I would have written off Wikipedia as a website that did not contain any relevant information for academic-grade research or writing. However, I have learned that Wikipedia editors view the site with perhaps even more strict guidelines than peer reviewers for journals and books! There are many nuanced guidelines to follow; approaching writing or editing Wikipedia articles with an unbiased lens can indeed prove difficult for academicians.

Overall, I was able to write and add a hermeneutic phenomenology sub-section to the Applications section of the Hermeneutics page. I chose to add this section for several reasons. In reviewing what pages regarding hermeneutic phenomenology already existed, I found that the hermeneutic phenomenology page was a re-direct to the overarching phenomenology page, where a subsection on hermeneutic phenomenology exists. When reviewing the phenomenology page, I found that there was a rather lengthy argument between multiple editors on the state of phenomenology due to contributions from several Nazi-associated German philosophers. I did not feel this was the best place for me to contribute, as I could tell that as soon as I added a contribution, it would be removed or edited. Although we talked in class about the benefits of going through an external revision, this would have been more political and less topical. This assignment opened my eyes to a different form of peer review from the outside world rather than within a program or classroom, from people with varying levels of education and background.

Thus, I searched for other pages where I felt my contributions would be welcomed and worthwhile. In reviewing the Hermeneutics page, I noticed that the Applications section did not contain phenomenology. I was surprised as the section contained psychology, philosophy, and other related applications. When writing my qualitative research mini-paper, I wrote a long history section and knew I had many citations that would add well to the Hermeneutics article. I ended up adding two paragraphs, modified from my mini-paper, to fit the confines of Wikipedia formatting and five citations. I also linked out to five different Wikipedia articles that I mentioned in my contribution, including key researchers and “main pages” as was the formatting in the other Applications sub-sections. I received a few pieces of good peer review feedback from my classmates including sentence structure and further defining concepts which I incorporated into the final version. I moved the section into the main page and it fits perfectly within the confines of the already existing Hermeneutics page structure. I have not yet received any edits to this contribution since moving it out of my sandbox and into live Wikipedia, and they have lived on the main page for over a week!

In contributing to my peers’ articles, I noticed the biggest edits I made were formatting. The Wikipedia modules taught me a lot about specific formatting, citation, and structure utilized by the site which some of my peers did not follow in their Sandboxes. I am not sure if people were just throwing a first draft in their editing spaces or if they didn’t understand all of the modules. However, Wikipedia formatting was definitely the most challenging part of adapting my writing to the site’s standards, and I wanted to make sure my colleagues were aware of what needed to be changed in order to bring their contributions up to par.

I believe Wikipedia has the potential to change qualitative research by adding more accumulated work to the topical page. As it stands now, the qualitative research page does not have much to offer the field. In a sense, I feel that most researchers feel the same way about Wikipedia that quantitative researchers feel about qualitative researchers; many claim the two do not provide much to the academy. But, in the way qualitative researchers have proven their worth, Wikipedia EDU can and will do the same for Wikipedia as a platform. I believe the partnership between Wikipedia and universities will begin to change the platform’s perception.