User:DeLandNebbb/New sandbox

Dennlander Nebril

Professor Hanley

ENG-216

12/5/2023

Wikipedia Reflective Essay

In the beginning I thought that creating a wiki article let alone a new one was a little bit of a daunting task. When I was trying to find an article to work on I found lots of topics that I could work on but they were either boring or I could not find anything on the topic. It was kind of hard trying to find articles but I finally found one that I liked. I chose to write about Terron Beckham which was actually pretty interesting. Being a new article I did not have to change anything about the article I wrote all by myself. When finding material for my article it was rather difficult since it was about a living person that had little sources on him. I eventually did find some sources on him and I chose to write mainly about his football career. I wrote about his highschool and college career and how he did not make it to the NFL. I chose to focus on his football because there were more articles and information on the topic. Then I found out more about his social media career and chose to write about that as well. I love sports so this topic was easier to write about than most of the articles I found. I also added a section about all of his other callings to other sports. He had a stint in rugby which he excelled at and he almost had a career in the WWE but that fell through. Overall writing about him was fun and was really interesting writing about a person that has lots of similar interests.

The peer reviewing articles was an interesting experience and it was very helpful getting feedback from my peers. I found that looking at other people's articles helped me build on my article. Some of the feedback I gave was to be more neutral and have more neutral sounding words. Also breaking up the paragraphs could help the reader take in the information better because it is spread out more. Some of the feedback I got was that I needed to add a little bit of information here and there and I needed to reword my sentences better. Overall my peer reviewers thought my article was pretty good off the bat so I was happy about that. Also I just want to say that the most confusing part of the whole article was the addition of the info boxes. When I was working on them it was so confusing because I had to input codes and stuff into the info box to combine them but other than that it was pretty easy.

I actually learned alot from Wikipedia, like how to find articles that need pages and requested articles that people want. I also learned to actually make a wikipedia page because I thought people hired other people to create pages. But now I realize if that was the case people could lie and stuff. But using reputable sources and keeping the article as neutral as possible makes wikipedia a trusted source for information about a subject. I also found that I got a lot better at sourcing and gathering articles with the help of this article creation. I also learned a bit of code that is within wikipedia and how to use it from the lessons online. I also learned that you just can not add a photo to your article right away. There is like a library you go to and also you can upload photos so they can be reviewed by people so they can be added. Most of my assignments are like do this and you're done but this assignment was more intricate than the assignments I had before. This assignment had deadlines and we were supposed to do something to our wikipedia article every week and add to it. Wikipedia can be used in a multitude of ways and can be used for sourcing stuff. Like most people don’t know who Terron Beckham is but by using Wikipedia as a platform to talk about him can give him more exposure to people who are interested in learning about him. This is important because Wikipedia brings in a lot of traffic and someone might stumble on something they like and it might be the article I created.

In conclusion the wikipedia article creation was a great experience and I think I learned alot from creating an article all by myself. It did take a really long time to create but that was okay and I overall had a good and easy time creating it. Would I do it again by myself? Maybe, but it was fun. Thank you Professor Hanley.