User:AustinThomson/Reflections

As a child that grew up in the technology boom, Wikipedia and I are far from strangers. Wikipedia was always there for school projects, general knowledge, or even learning more about something obscure. I never questioned where any of the information came from. I had assumed that a lot of the items were transferred over from a slew of dictionaries and encyclopedias that had previously been printed. I didn’t even acknowledge the extent of the human element to Wikipedia. I knew that people could make changes here and there, but had no clue how much time and dedication really went into the community. In just the few short weeks since we began this assignment, I’ve come to learn that Wikipedia truly is a shining (barn) star on how online communities begin, grow, and operate.

At the beginning of this assignment, I thought the road would be paved for me. All I had to do was pick a topic, write a few paragraphs, and call it a day. However, even picking the topic was more difficult than I had originally anticipated. Every single topic that I thought could be a potential article had a detail or two that prevented it from going any further. In fact, finding something that wasn’t already written about was a task in itself. After changing my topic a few times here and there, I finally had settled on the Associated Students of the University of Washington.

After picking my topic, I thought diving in would be a breeze. However, after completing the tutorial, both the original and the themed  “adventure”, I still felt like I didn’t know where to begin. The interface to put text on a page reminded me of the introductory computer science class I had taken. An option that I did appreciate was the visual editor, a feature that was completely unseen during the tutorials. My main problem that I had with this topic was establishing notability according to the Wikipedia standards, something I never would have imagined being an issue. After some careful guidance, I was able to push past the notability aspect and put together a solid article. The next challenge was taking the article that I had drafted and moving it to the main space. A task that I assumed would be simple proved to be quite a conundrum. Through this issue is when I truly learned the community that was behind Wikipedia. It came to my attention that a previous article had already existed on my topic of choice and had been merged in with a larger article, The University of Washington Wikipedia page.

Being able to see the log of actions that were taken through the creation and maintenance of the Associated Students of the University of Washington was astounding to me. I could see conversations between users on whether or not my topic deserved it’s own page or should continue to be merged. Conversations like these are what keep the community going. Constant engagement between users on the topics that interest them is constantly pushing and dictating what happens in the community of Wikipedia.

A concept that we discussed in class was the scope of a community. A general look at Wikipedia as a whole gives us one of the biggest scopes that exists on the web. As I delved deeper into specific subtopics, I saw that there are users who patrol those topics and hold them near and dear to their hearts. In class, we saw time after time how many smaller communities exist under the Wikipedia umbrella. Whether that be the Guild of Copy Editors or the WikiProject of Military History, there was a home for everyone.

After all was said and done, it is a strange feeling typing in my topic and seeing a live article after the weeks of editing tiny details here and there. Knowing that there is somebody out there who is thrilled to edit articles on college student unions is mind-boggling. The people are what make the community, and the differences in interests, hobbies, and motivations are truly what make Wikipedia unique. I’ve come to learn that all the rules and regulations that I struggled to overcome where there for a reason. It has been easy to see that a lot of these rules were created through trial and error. New rules and regulations are constantly being added, changed, or removed all together. This goes to show that the Wikipedia community is growing and changing to the needs of what matters most, the people. Through this journey, I’m proud to call myself a member of the community known as Wikipedia.