User:Claptonic/Report

Wikipedia contains a wide range of information and often, it is possible to discover articles covering subjects that one would’ve never thought of. While there are already a bountiful of information covered on Wikipedia, there are still a number of articles waiting to be created or added with more information in form of stubs. After careful consideration, the article that I have chosen to contribute to is the ‘Gwangju International Film Festival’. During the editing and contributing process of the article, I was able to experience Wikipedia’s characteristic as an online community, which is something that not a lot of people are aware of, including me, before I started contributing to Wikipedia. In this paper, I will discuss the reason I have chosen to contribute to this article, overall experience of developing on this article, the obstacles I have faced, and my advice for the Wikipedia.

I have chosen ‘Gwangju International Film Festival’, which is a film festival in South Korea, as my subject because while the subject may require several sections to properly cover its history and story, all that was present in the article was a single paragraph. It was classified as a stub, which is an article that is considered as short and incomplete. Since it is a festival from my home country, I thought that it would be interesting to add more information such as the background of the festival, why the festival has been discontinued since 2015, and the types of films they have shown along with the types of awards. Moreover, I hoped that through my contribution, discussion on Korean Culture in Wikipedia would become more active.

I have faced a few obstacles when I started to contribute to the article. The first and most prominent obstacle was that this festival hasn’t been the most famous festival, and the number of coverages on this festival was overall very low. Moreover, the official website for the festival was no longer active, and the only website I could rely on to gather information on the festival and the films it has shown was either ‘Naver’, which is the most famous search engine in South Korea, or IMDB, an online database with information of film/television related information. If information was missing from both sites, I had to give up on adding that information. Also, since it was a more minor festival, with the official website closed as well, it was difficult to gather photos and images for the article that could make the content of the article more abundant and visibly attractive. I was able to locate its logos and posters, but photos taken for the festival were mostly in news articles, which forbid people from using the images. Eventually, I couldn’t add photos from the festival.

From my experience, what I realized was that identity-based commitment could play a huge factor in contributing to articles in Wikipedia. Since I was a Korean, I felt more willing to select a topic related to culture in South Korea so that readers can have more profound comprehension of my country. By contributing to a minor stub, the chance is that the updated article could be noticed and gain many readers, but also, there is a chance that it will continue to stay relatively unnoticed. But gaining popularity wasn’t part of the motivation for my contribution. Rather, I just hoped that more Korean Culture can be represented in Wikipedia. The reward for contributing to this article is closer to my personal satisfaction than getting noticed for the article, it could be said that my motivation was something more intrinsic than extrinsic. I believe I wouldn’t be the only person who would contribute to Wikipedia based on identity-based commitment. A unique aspect of Wikipedia is that it has established a system through which we can discover stubs that belong to certain groups, such as Korean culture. I felt a sense of connection through contributing to the article and felt that Wikipedia could help to facilitate such feeling of connection.

Based on my experience, one of the advices that I could provide for Wikipedia is that the ‘Talk’ page seems rather underused and more emphasis could be placed on its usage. Except for some articles, the usage of the page seems minimal and I didn’t feel that the page helped me much when I was editing my article. Possibly advertising more about the ‘Talk’ page and providing some sort of incentive for using the page could contribute to more people providing their advices and opinions on the page. The ‘Talk’ page represents Wikipedia’s character as a community, and the lack of the use of the ‘Talk’ page made it hard for me to recognize it as a community. Wikipedia has been able to expand itself based on need-based, normative-based, and even identity-based commitments, however, I felt that even more commitment could be produced through creating a sense of bond within the community. For example, to facilitate the usage of the ‘Talk’ pages, they could add more familiar aspects like emojis to the talk page, just like we are communicating in a regular chatting platform. Also, they could create a talk page for people that has similar interests, and facilitate contribution to the groups of articles that needs more information.

For the image use, I thought that Wikipedia should allow more leniency to images one can use for the article. For articles about events, photos and image play a huge role in comprehending what the festival is about and what kind of events take place in the festival. In my case, I felt that I could’ve made the article look more enjoyable and inviting if I was allowed to use more images from more sources. My last advice is to make the beginner’s learning process easier and more entertaining. The lessons did help immensely during my editing process, however, I felt that they are too long and that during the process for the beginners to complete them on their own, a lot of newcomers would feel overwhelmed. When it comes to newcomers like me, I believe that the important thing to do is to keep us entertained. Possibly adding game-effects or animation-effects to the introduction would be beneficial as well.

Overall, my experience of using Wikipedia and being an active participant helped me to understand how getting more people to contribute to articles is important. So many interesting articles were left as stubs and I felt that it is important for Wikipedia to think of strategies to invite newcomers, as well as motivate existing editors to contribute to more stubs and articles. Also, I believe that Wikipedia is special in that it is not just an encyclopedia but also a community. Wikipedia shouldn’t forget its aspect as a community and continuously work to develop its character as a community, as well as make it easier for the editors to make the articles of their interest more resourceful and attractive.