User:Danaorow/Report

Reflection Essay
This class and the wikipedia tasks and contributions have been a great learning and research opportunity as this course posed as a gateway for engaging in an online community that I would not have given the chance if on my own. Reflecting on my personal experience in Wikipedia, one of the things that really shocked me was the long and ever growing list of items counted as stubs as well as the abundance of content that still does not have an existing page for them.

Some of the main things that I learned through this wikipedia experience were the guidelines and the background procedures regarding each wikipedia article. I was unaware that the images presented in wikipedia must follow certain criteria and not just from a generic internet search. Additionally, I learned that there were classifications of the article pages themselves. In this class, a primary objective we had was improving an article from a stub class or creating a non-existing article. Choosing to assign myself an article deemed to be really difficult as there was a wide variety of topics and articles to improve, while also considering the available information to add sufficient references. I ended up choosing Svenskeren, a professional Danish League of Legends player, who is currently representing North America on one of the NA teams. My particular interest in doing this article of a person stemmed from my interest in the game itself as well as my prior knowledge of other wikipedia articles covering other professional players.

While choosing this article to improve may have been more or less simplistic, there were great challenges to fill up the article itself as the player’s career is very extensive and inclusive with minimal information online about his personal life as well as his whereabouts on and off the competitive scene. These specific parameters made it difficult to fill in the career portion of this article as well as his personal life. Using different pro player wikipedia articles as a reference did help me in formatting and justifying my work in Svenskeren’s article as these were articles that were already live and approved with considerably high ratings in their respective talk pages. Overall, the experience in finding an article, improving it with my own research and biases, while trying to maintain within all the criteria boundaries that wikipedia has, including a neutral tone was all intellectually stimulating and enlightening.

Despite having such a commendable experience, there were a few hiccups and critiques that I have as a college student looking into the process and procedures of the wikipedian experience. If I were to suggest some tweaks or improvements to the Wikimedia Foundation, I think that they should consider changing the layout and/or UI. As we’ve discussed in class, the engagement and total amount of committed users have peaked in the early 2000s and has slowly dwindled down. I believe that the White and Black text-formatted setup is what makes wikipedia, wikipedia, however, I feel that there are some changes to the UI that could be made to give it a refreshing feel without taking away from it’s identity. A key component to the UI is the design of the web pages and the layout as well as the details of the tabs and dialogue boxes. Currently these components, as well as the text itself gives off almost a windows 7 feel. The structure of web pages could feel a lot more modern with a different structure similar to that of windows 10. Another feature on the UI side of things is with each web page. Articles could be more dynamic if they could be composed of images, gifs and have sections that could provide a video preview.

As one of the main pillars of attraction in any interface, there is a great lack of images and media coverage within each article due to the regulations and guidelines of strict images. A suggestion regarding this issue would be related to the automated reference AI. When attempting to publish changes with reference to a black listed source, a dialogue box asks the user to remove the source as it was identified and targeted as an unusable source. There should be some AI filter that does a similar job via searching through the roots of the pasted image as well as a quality checker to make sure that the image is not rendered too far into a pixelated grid.

I believe that these recommendations should be taken into consideration more seriously as a relatively new user because I do not have that much experience in the wikipedian culture and community, however, from the discussions and concepts discussed throughout each lectures, there are a multitude of factors that play into motivating people to join an online community, as well as motivating them to stay committed. These factors could have varying reasons to back them up, but in order to create a refreshing vibe to the website, I think that minor user interface tweaks that do not break the identity of the site greatly helps in getting people more excited about using and learning to be more in depth in wikipedia.