User:Emariemag/sandbox

Emilia Maggi

Professor Mandiberg

COM 232: History of Design and Digital Media

December 11, 2013

Reflection Paper

The course project to work on Wikipedia was definitely different than writing a regular term paper. It was a good experience to actually contribute to a largely viewed encyclopedia on the internet. Most term papers are based on historical or contemporary analysis, which means including your own interpretations and opinions. When working with Wikipedia, none of your own personal opinions and research is allowed. Everything on Wikipedia is supposed to be factual information that can be backed up with a citation. All the information needs to be from secondary sources, no primary sources allowed. I did learn more about Wikipedia than I ever knew. I guess I never paid enough attention to notice that every fact is cited from another source. After working with Wikipedia, I do trust it more. I trust it because everything needs to be cited. Information on articles cannot just be added without actual proof of a fact and if they are it will get deleted. That is really reassuring when reading Wikipedia pages. Before this class, I figured Wikipedia was mostly incorrect about its facts and my professors always state how unreliable the website is, which I know now isn't completely true because again everything needs to be cited from a reliable source. Citing all the facts on my Wikipedia page actually made it easier for me to say my facts added were true and reliable. A lot of my facts that I added to Will Burtin’s page was mostly found in his biography, where one of the authors was his son-in-law. I think learn any new research method with this assignment. I was aware of how to research academic journals and scholarly articles and incorporate them into my writing. It is really interesting to know that many people might read what I wrote on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is always one of the first websites to show up when searching something on the internet; if the search has a Wikipedia page it will certainly be on the first page of search results. My article on Wikipedia will most likely be edited and by this time next year can be completely erased or edited. Knowing this is a little upsetting, especially because it does take a lot of hard work to find the resources and add them to Wikipedia. However thinking in a positive way, the edits hopefully will be to better the article.