User:Fmandog85/reflection page

Ah so it has come to this point in the semester. I have finished my trials and tribulations with wikipedia. Hours of editing searching for the one article with two misplaced commas that will put me right over that 45 articles mark. How I will miss ye sleepless nights of editing and wasted afternoons of reading about the anti-Christ. All sarcasm aside I must say wiki has taught me quite a bit. The first is that there are a lot of people who are considerably smarter than I am. This isn't something really new but it is more evident since I joined the wikipedia community. When I started reading talk pages and saw that they too contained massive amounts of new information, I began to understand that the wikipedia community holds a wealth of knowledge that reaches beyond the articles. This made it difficult for me to feel that my contributions were worthwhile. I am, after all, just a lowly undergraduate college student with so much left to learn. This however changed as I began to delve deeper into wikipedia. I began to notice all of the holes that exist in this fantastic matrix of knowledge. This pulled me into the wiki community for good. As far as the class is considered I would say that the majority of the assignments were very appropriate. The last one, making an article good, was very hard for me within my field because of the limited amount of knowledge that I have, in comparison with other wiki users. I actually learned very little about writing with wiki. Wikipedia is a world unto itself. All of the users are simply citizens of this massive nation and we all speak the common wiki, some of us better than others. Writing in wikipedia has not severely advanced my writing skills other than it has offered me more practice. When time is again on my side I hope to donate a few more hours to wiki. I would like to think that as I advance in my studies that someday I will be able to contribute so grand scientific discovery, but I would settle for a half a paragraph somewhere. In closing I have found that wikipedia offers a unique opportunity to the world. If it remains purely a tool to share information with the world it will change the world. If I could I would make every person on facebook and myspace join and contribute to wikipedia and quit facebook and myspace. Wikipedia is the one online community that I feel can help society rather than hurt it. Of course that is contingent on the fact that we cannot stop reading books.

=Reflecting on Brett's Reflection=

Ah yes, Brett, I agree with you that to an extent working with wiki has multiple trials and tribulations. I think its cool that even though wiki took up a significant amount of your time that you still got "something" out of this experience. The thing about wiki is that yes, there is always going to be someone out there who is smarter than you who knows a heck of a lot more than you might ever be able to contribute to anything...but alas, that's life. But until then, keep on wiki'ing, friend, b/c unlike you I do not enjoy wiki, and so if you're out there and you like it enough to keep the wiki community thriving, well you go for it. :) Your comments about facebook and myspace are rather interesting..I've never thought about that before..but its a good point.  I guess if people spent near as much time educating themselves by use of wiki (although you can argue that you can't educate yourself from wiki) as they do facebooking and myspacing, we all might have better things to talk about than who wrote on who's wall and how many times you were "poked" in a day (get your mind out of the gutter, friends).  Good reflection, insightful and enjoyable to read.  Hollar. Lvlnglafoftneatsteak 15:02, 2 December 2006 (UTC)