User:CathyChen1998

Reflection

In modern society, technology development brought us to a new online world. We almost could not live without online sources and information. I started to use Wikipedia and Wiki community since Junior High school. From that time to present, Wikipedia is always be the best choice to getting new knowledge. After learning from Wiki Assignment for the last two months, I have received several skills on editing articles in Wikipedia by my own. Acknowledging the level of each article, getting to know how the rating system work in Wikipedia to judge one editor…

At the beginning, since I am not a “tech” person, I met so many barriers to complete the assignment. For example, I did not know how to find a proper Stub article, could not follow the instruction assigned in sections, do not know how to start editing sources in Sandbox… Fortunately, Mr. Salt really helped me a lot on finding articles and accomplished the following tasks during the office hour and sections. Still, when I was considering which kind of article that I would like to improve, because my major is cinema and media studies, entertainment related topics came upon my mind. Especially in K-pop field, due to the abundant experiences, I chose YG family as my final topic for the Wikipedia assignment. YG family is an entertainment label of YG entertainment which is pretty famous in South Korea since YG is one of three largest entertainment companies there. I was struggling on choosing South Korea entertainment or Chinese or Japanese one, because those are my most familiar areas, this time I chose K-pop, next time would be another one instead.

Moreover, choosing the article was only the very first step of the whole journey. It is important to find reliable sources and provide a neutral statement in the Wikipedia because writing non-biased statements in Wikipedia is a basic rule according to the “Wiki norm”. Because my topic relates to Korean cultures, I searched so many websites from all languages, Google, Naver, Baidu…Different languages may contain various sources on my article. It was really difficult to find proper sources for my article because most of the contents in the article are related to Gossips, Personal Affairs. Finding news without any judges towards those artists was not an easy job. We have to make sure that all the sentences we wrote did not contain personal or unfair ideas and words in order to provide the readers a health reading environment. Which could be the reason that Wikipedia could survive among the information world.

At last, after experiencing the whole progress of editing the Wikipedia articles, I realized that how difficult for a company or an online community to build up an organized environment. We have to think about so many violations and possibilities on performing inside the program. Everybody could contribute in Wikipedia and providing suggestions to the community, but not everyone can really achieve the level on direct changing the contents in Wikipedia which prevent the Chaos that new users could made. I never thought about publish my work in this kind of big website before taking the class. But it really proves that the low entry level can still have successful big online communities.