User:Amyabsa/Reflections

Amy Absalonson's Wikipedia Reflections Essay

Going into this assignment, I felt overwhelmed by the task ahead. Wikipedia has always been a resource I've used regularly, but I had never imagined trying to contribute to it for any reason. I think I never thought I would contribute because it is intimidating and I didn't feel knowledgeable enough on a subject in order to be "smart enough" to contribute an accurate article. After doing enough research, I felt ready to write an article about Donate Life America, but was still hesitant on how to correctly contribute, because I have never been a tech savvy person.

After taking part in the training modules, I began to become more comfortable with editing Wikipedia and with the idea of writing my own article for the world to see. Now that I had experienced the training, and had some practice in a sandbox, I started to explore other Wikipedia articles on similar subjects like mine. This gave me a better idea of the kind of format and tone I should use for my article. This research and practice was very helpful and I learned from this that you cannot simply go into Wikipedia and start editing blindly, it takes time, education, and practice.

After making my article live for the first time, I found that the peer review process made me feel better. Looking at each others articles and helping each other with editing was extremely helpful in the process of making a Wikipedia worthy article. Not only did I enjoy reading/editing others, but those who peer edited my article were helpful and willing to go out of their way to give me fresh ideas and to help me find solutions to any issues I was facing.

Here are some ways I can connect my personal experience to the concepts we have discussed in class:

First the key concept of commitment. The main reason I kept coming back to this online community was because of my commitment to the class and my commitment to my article. Since we were allowed to choose our topic I was very committed to the article form the start because it is something I'm passionate about. I think this is a great aspect of class to allow the student to pick the article about anything that is relevant to be on Wikipedia of their choosing. It creates stronger commitment automatically. My commitment to the other classmates kept me coming back because I knew I was committed to peer editing and helping out others like they would do for me.

The design of this online community and having our class educational wiki page helped make the Wikipedia community seem smaller and more approachable for me as a newcomer, because it created a sense of a small group within a community, and helped me feel more comfortable contributing.

Some claims from our reading I thought were executed very well while I was partaking in editing Wikipedia were, it was very easy to find stub articles that needed to be contributed to, and there were also very easy “how-to” tools that I could always fall back on and/or search in Wikipedia how to do it correctly. This made the editing process a lot more attainable. Also, having small, frequent deadlines for each increment of our Wikipedia assignment contributions made it easy to stay on pace, and less intimidating when working on the assignment for the week. This made it easy to finish on time and to never be too overwhelmed by the work load ahead. I think the peer editing process was the most beneficial for me because my personal intrinsic motivation increased knowing I had to interact with others as we all tried to improve each others and our own articles.

I had bonds based commitment to this community because I had a commitment to this specific group, because we all were going through and tackling the same experiences at once as newcomers. It also helped having this small community to help me understand what is “normative behavior” in this kind of an online setting. This made it less intimidating because I knew what was expected of me, and knew others would edit and correct me when I was wrong.

Overall, I think this assignment of participating/contributing to an online community was very successful, thanks to the careful design of this class and Wikipedia's endless resources.