User:Andyavocado/Reflections

Being part of the Wikipedia community has been fascinating and a great learning experience. It showed me the basics and what it is like to be part of one of the largest online communities. The article that I chose to write about was called Paper Sons which I learned from a friend who was a descendent of a Paper Son. This was the first time I have ever written an article on Wikipedia. At first, I thought of Wikipedia as a really hard and complicated community to be part of but after playing the interactive Wikipedia Adventures game, it gave me a boost of motivation to continue on with contributing to Wikipedia. The game went through step-by-step on how to edit an article. It was pretty simple. This game made me realize that Wikipedia was not as difficult as I thought it was. Anyone who is able to follow the Wikipedia rules and is able to write can create any article as long as there isn't one already made. The orientation on the other hand was a bit long which I found a bit boring. Without the Wikipedia adventures, I would not have continued to learn hiw to get started with wikipedia.

The topic I chose was exciting because I love writing about history. I also was writing this article for my friend because he knew little about this subject. I wanted to gather all the information I could so that I could provide him with an overview of what his ancestors went through in trying to come to America. Making this article for my friend not only motivated me intrinsically but made me commit to continue contributing as much I could possibly find. This was a bond based type of commitment because I had an emotional connection with my friend. I had the goal and the obligation in my mindset to provide valuable information about my friend's ancestral past. This is only a temporary commitment because my friend is not actually part of the Wikipedia community but only for this article I am writing about. But I still consider my friend as being a bond based commitment. I don't really have anyone in the community that makes me feel committed to help Wikipedia with fulfilling its mission or goals. The other based commitment that I felt was involved was the need  based  because without being part of the Wikipedia community and leaving it  I would not do too good in this class with the grade being the extrinsic motivator. Wikipedia also had barns stars that also acted as an extrinsic motivator. Even though barnstars were produced in order to motivate people I really didn't care for it much. If I were to be awarded barn stars it wouldn't increase my motivation much.

I feel that my article is a good article by Wikipedia standards because I focused on the notability of the articles and websites that I was using to provide me information on paper sons and also the neutrality of my writing. The majority of the information that I found online was already in neutral writing form but I knew that, that was just copying and pasting information to my Wikipedia article which would be considered plagiarism. So I had to paraphrase most of the information that caused me to have some grammatical errors. With the peer reviews and random users on Wikipedia, my article read smoothly and gave me less work to worry about. I also used the article Boat people as a reference to help me with how I should structure my article and how it should look like. This article was very similar to my article because it involved immigration but with people from Vietnam. After I wrote a good amount on my topic I felt that a photo was necessary in order to make this article legitimate. I searched for a photo with the key words "paper son" and had hundreds of results. I had trouble looking for a photo at first but after looking through many pages of irrelevant search results I was able to find one.

Another concept that we talked about in class was moderation which I encountered through this process .I had moderators that seemed to be experts on Wikipedia such as User:Postcard Cathy and User:Dawnseeker2000 who edited my article. There were also some bots that made contributions that I could have not done because of my inexperience such as changing my categories to more relevant ones. I was also told by the ReferencBot that I caused a broken reference name on the Haebangchon page that I peer reviewed. I don't understand what a broken reference name is since I am a newcomer so hopefully someone can help with that article and fix the mistake. All who have contributed to my article gave helpful and positive contributions

Overall, I feel proud of my article because I put a lot of time and effort by doing a lot of research and at the same time, learning about a topic I didn't  understand until now. At this point in time, I am motivated but I feel that I may not be committed to continue. I believe that the only way that I will continue writing articles is if I have intrinsic motivation such as writing about things that I care about and is near and dear to my heart. I believe that if there were more members in the community that interacted with me from the start, I think I would be more involved in the future. Even though contributors to wikipedia are decreasing each year, wikipedia will not die because it is a very useful website.