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Wikipedia Reflection Essay
Before learning about how to contribute to Wikipedia through the online training, Wikipedia to me is just a place to search for necessary information or some concepts from class. I never know how does the Wikipedia work or try to make an edit on any pages. After taking the training lessons, I began to have a deeper understanding of the functions of Wikipedia and get involved in the Wikipedia community.

To begin with, by learning the introductive passage on the page ‘Wikipedia adventure’ and playing the games on the page, I learned some basic operating skills. I first start to create my first Wikipedia account and had my page. I learned that I can make edits on this page and also create many subpages for different uses. I knew that I could draft my article in the ‘sandbox’ so that I can edit and improve it before actually published it on the main page. There is also a talk page that connects you with other Wikipedians. Through playing the games on ‘Wikipedia Adventure,’ I followed the instructions to edit my draft. There are two ways of editing: visual editing and code editing. The visual editing is kind of like a Word page whereas the code editing needs more coding skills since it has a lot of different symbols to remember. For a starter like me, I like the visual editing better because I am familiar with Word and it is easier for the visual editing to set up the heading and the reference list.

I also checked some pages of the Wikipedia communities. The one that left the most impressions to me is the Wikipedia: Department of Fun. The structure of the page is very different from other pages of Wikipedia communities. It has unique headings, and it provides various links of games or projects that you can play on the page. However, for me, the structure is a little hard to read and follow. The layout is kind of disorganized, and it feels like you cannot get the main idea of the page in the first glance. Also, as a reader who is a non-native speaker, it was hard for me to understand some of the jokes on the page. It seems like there are not many female members in the community either.

There were some obstacles on the road of editing Wikipedia. When I was trying to edit my draft for the article ‘Amore Pacific Corporation,’ I misunderstood the instructions and ended up create a new page instead with a new title ‘Amore Pacific Corp.’ After about a day, the administrators from Wikipedia sent me a message saying that my page was deleted because of the violation of the copyright rules and for using promotion tunes in the article since it is an article about market brands. It was a depressing experience for me because I was meant to add more contents to it. Building from my own story, I would suggest that Wikipedia develop an auto-checking function that can help the users to decide whether their drafts should be published right away, and also ask the user to confirm twice before they move their drafts to the main page to avoid unnecessary loss.

An interesting thing I found is the different definition of ‘promotion tones’ in an article from different encyclopedias. Before I write the draft, I check the article for Amore Pacific on Baidu Baike, the biggest encyclopedia in mainland China. On the Chinese page, I saw that there was a section that introduces the company culture and concept using quotes from their official website. I thought it is necessary for the readers to understand the company culture, so I wrote a paragraph of introduction using the quotes from their official sites too. However, I forgot to consider that the official website is not recognized as a reliable source in Wikipedia. It seems like Wikipedia had much stricter rules on the article related to market brands than other encyclopedias. On Baidu they actually use official website of the company as a reliable source. It is reasonable for Wiki to set these rules in case of avoiding advertisement, but it also makes the article lacking a lot of related information, like the basic description of the product.

Another thing that is problematic is the talk page. I would suggest that Wikipedia set up a more organized and complete page for people to discuss, especially on the mobile end. When I was getting the message that my article had copyright issues from Wikipedia, I was outside with only my phone on me. It is very hard for me to read the full message and edit my article on the phone, so I had to ignore the message. If I could have access to my draft on the phone, I may be able to make some necessary edits before it got deleted completely.

In addition to the access problem, there are many discussions on the talk page that are unnecessary or unrelated to the topic, disrupting the message that is constructive. For instance, on the Chinese version of Wikipedia, there is always a huge fight under the talk page of the term ‘China’ because of the political issues. The users from mainland China and users from Taiwan are arguing about the territorial disputes all the time. Even after the administrators block the accounts, when the new users come, they start the argument again. In class, we learned about the newcomers’ theory which illustrates that the new users may act in ways that offend other group members or otherwise undercut the smooth functioning of the group. (BSOC, page 181) In my opinion, Wikipedia could create another page or a chat group for the open discussion and only show filtered comments on the talk page. In this way, the talk page will be more organized and can effectively avoid vandalism.

To conclude, learning how to edit on Wikipedia gave me a more in-depth understanding of online encyclopedias and improved my writing skills at the same time.