User:Billysuh/subpage

Ever since I learned how to use the computer, it's all I've ever known. I never actually kept count, but if I had to put a number to it, I'd say I've been apart of 7-8 online communities. Adding Wikipedia onto that list feels really weird because my participation in the Wikipedia community has been far different from my participation in other online communities. Personally, I don't like how the term "lurker" sounds, but that's exactly the type of person I am when it comes to the online communities I find myself apart of now like Facebook and Reddit. I have never really been someone to post my own, original content, so being apart of Wikipedia's community really forced me to do that - it's been really weird.

I think the most interesting thing about having to have used Wikipedia throughout this past semester was discovering how it really works. I remember my first experience of Wikipedia: I was around 6-7 years old, and my brother said he could do a cool magic trick where he could make my name appear on a website.. and now, I realize how easy that was for him. Besides that, all I had ever used Wikipedia for was getting information and getting sources from the "Reference" sections of specific pages for different reports. The most shocking detail about this online community was that the number of active contributors to Wikipedia is so low compared to how many articles have been published. Granted, there are many, many one-and-done Wikipedians who probably contributed to a fair share of those articles, but to think your average "active" Wikipedian creates ~10+ articles throughout his/her time in this online community is crazy to me. I do, however, understand why there would be so many people who contribute once or twice then dip, and I think that's something that every online community experiences. If I'm going to be completely honest, I don't really anticipate using Wikipedia after this class mostly because it's just not a community I really see myself fitting into.

My experience on Wikipedia, however, hasn't been anything less of what it was. As a newcomer into a community like this, I think that it's very easy to become acclimated with this online culture. Kraut and Resnick mention the issue with trolls, but since there's such heavy moderation on every Wikipedia page, it's such a rare occurrence. In fact, the level of moderation was surprising to me as well. In all fairness, I wholeheartedly understand why this would be the case; Wikipedia isn't really as much a social network as it is an encyclopedia. Ensuring that the right information is always present is obviously crucial to this website's (not community's) success. My participation to this online community came in the form of an (unpublished, unfortunately) article about a local restaurant that I used to love. My favorite part of my experience here has been the willingness of other people to help. It's not that people are willing to help that shocks me, but rather how much people are willing to help a newcomer get used to the culture, the do's vs. the don'ts, etc. When I heard that the big project for the semester was to create my own Wikipedia article, I was pretty intimidated, and that's putting it about as lightly as possible. However, getting constant feedback, seeing how people outside of this class were willing to chip their own feedback in, not just in my article but others' as well, really made it a memorable experience.