User:Germanboi87/essay

If someone had told me at the beginning of my college journey that I would enjoy an English class, I would not have believed him. Writing essays is something I do not necessarily consider fun, I think it’s dry and boring. So, when I found out that we were working with Wikipedia in this class, I was pleasantly surprised. I have used Wikipedia all my life, but I have never edited or created articles myself. It was always something that I wanted to try out, and now I finally got the chance.

Before the class even started, I received a couple of emails from my professor with instructions to sign up for Wikipedia, and how to get some work done ahead of time. I realized very quickly, that if I stay on top of my work, this class will be fun, and I would also have a good chance to make a good grade. Naturally, I started the first few assignments and trainings as soon as I could. I want to mention that everything was online, and we never had to turn in a physical copy of something. In my opinion, this is ideal, because everything is saved on a server and there is no chance the professor can lose your work, which is something I am concerned about in some of my other classes haha.

Anyway, soon I started copyediting my first articles. I love that I was able to choose the articles I wanted to edit myself, this gave me the opportunity to greatly improve articles about topics that I was really interested in. Some of the articles I chose to edit were Miss Pacific Islands, Mru people, Sebastian Schneider, Heinrich Theodor Höch, Baseball in the Netherlands, my hometown Neuenburg am Rhein, Freiburg im Breisgau, and many others that mostly had something to do with baseball. Those copyedits included translating content from the German Wiki, adding new sources to articles that needed them, or just fixing grammar mistakes. All this copyediting prepared me for the main assignment, which is writing my own article. I had to find a topic that had not been written up on Wikipedia yet, preferably something local. Since I am from Germany, this meant, I had to find something else, and it also meant I could not use any local resources like the Alabama archives. Fortunately, the article about Baseball in Germany had not been written up yet, which was perfect. This topic is something I am passionate about and I already had some significant background knowledge about it. Now, the only thing I needed to do, was to find multiple and credible sources and references. I was kind of worried about that, because finding sources has always been one of my weaknesses in the past. I used to try to find all my sources with a google search, but this class taught me so many other ways to find sources that are so much better.

As a result, finding sources was not hard at all. I found a great book about the history of baseball in all of Europe, which I ordered immediately, and I found more books and journals through the AUM library. In the following weeks, I started drafting and writing up my article piece by piece. I had a lot of fun, and I put as much effort into it as possible. We also had to peer review other articles from our class. I hope that my review helped them improve their articles, because the review I received was definitely helpful. Sometimes it is important to have someone else look at something I wrote, as they might find something that I don't even notice.

One week after creating my article, I nominated it for DYK. I am so glad I did that, because as a result of that nomination, I received a lot of feedback and help from several Wikipedians. The review process was rather lengthy, but definitely worth it. There was a little problem in my hook, as it presented an uncertainty as a fact, but after I changed it, it was good to go. On November 12, my article about Baseball in Germany appeared on Wikipedia's front page, and it received over 4000 page views. Many "famous" Wikipedias like User:The Rambling Man or User:Ivar the Boneful took the time to read over my article and improve it. Of course, there is still a lot of content that needs to be added to the article, and I will continue doing so in the future.

Another part of this class was doing an article evaluation about a featured article. I chose the History of the New York Yankees, and during my research I discovered the lengthy process an article needs to go through before being promoted. Every single sentence and fact has to be cited, and there are several editors that read through every sentence of the article and improve it. I know now, that if I'm reading a featured article, I can be sure that all the information is correct.

This class definitely changed my picture of Wikipedia. Before this class, I would look up stuff on there, but there was always this thought in the back of my mind that I can't trust Wikipedia. Everyone always thinks that anyone can edit articles, and therefore it might be wrong. Now that I have actually worked with Wikipedia, I know that this is not true. There are countless editors that are constantly on the lookout for vandalism, and important articles are usually protected, meaning not everyone can edit it. This class also taught me how to find information that I can trust. Every article has a reference section which consists of credible and reliable sources, and using those help me get a good understanding of certain topics.

In the future, I am planning on writing more and more Wikipedia articles, especially about baseball related topics. It has been a lot of fun working together with my classmates and my professor in this class. The atmosphere in the classroom was always very good, there were a lot of jokes, but we also never lost focus. I encourage everyone to take this class. It not only gives you a new perspective on Wikipedia and the English language, it also helps you with finding and working with sources. This is probably the class where I learned the most since I started college.