User:GreysonAE/report

The article I chose to edit was “Basketball positions”. The stub-class article gives an overview of the five different positions that are on a basketball court during a game. When I was initially choosing an article, I wanted to write about something that I felt I had extensive knowledge on. The article was on the list of low-class stub articles and I saw it had a lot of room for improvement. This assignment taught me a lot about how Wikipedia articles are made, and evaluating online information as a whole.

In the first couple weeks building this article, I had a difficult time navigating through the site and making edits on my own. I often found myself reverting back to the tutorial pages almost every couple minutes to make sure I was doing it correctly. Each of the tutorials require you to navigate through them page by page, and it could be frustrating trying to find exactly what I’m looking for. One thing that I think would improve the efficiency to move between article topics would be an organized table of contents with a search tool. This would allow me to find the exact problems I’m looking for, and be able to quickly fix the problem.

One very helpful aspect of the program was as a newcomer Wikiedu did a great job of ensuring that I knew all of the guidelines that came with writing a Wikipedia article.

When editing my Wikipedia article, it became clear to me what I needed to focus on to make the article acceptable to be live to the public. The fact of the matter is, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that is compiled of user contributed information. Anyone can contribute and there are no actual limitations to what is actually posted. This highlights the importance that when a user is posting any sort of change of information to a Wikipedia, that it be factual and relevant. Credible sources need to be attributed to whenever any post of information were to be made.

Another aspect I caught on to was the appeal of how users want to further involve themselves in the Wiki community, and the bonds based commitment that they develop throughout their experience. This bonds based commitment is shown by those who are really committed to volunteering their time improving the website as a whole, and feel that it’s their obligation to do so since they identify with the community so strongly. This creates a sense of community and friendship, as well as a sense of belonging that will continuously draw users to return.

The first thing that I noticed when contributing was a neutral perspective is key to making a Wikipedia article. For an online encyclopedia, you cannot write from a biased or personal perspective when explaining a specific subject. Another thing that I made sure of was to verify all citations and references were from legitimate sources. In order for information to be placed on a publicly accessed source, it is important that the information that you are posting is credible. One suggestion I have for Wikipedia is that they should implement a type of fact checking feature that would be able to revise what is posted, as well as look up the links that are being referenced. This would allow for all content that is posted on Wikipedia to be automatically flagged and identified when a user publishes information and citations that are not credible.

When editing my article, one thing that became clear was some of the information provided on Wikipedia is not the highest caliber. I edited an article in which receives a small to medium amount of traffic regularly, and the information presented was very mediocre and uninformative in my opinion. Although brief overviews were given, it was not elaborative nor did it really tell me all of the things that I thought were key facts that were required on the subject.

Something to be mindful of but didn’t necessarily apply to my article was “trolls” throughout online communities. These are people that will post on a site in order to deliberately corrupt the content in which was initially intended. Although I did not personally experience this with my article, I found that it definitely has a large possibility of happening on a site like Wikipedia. This is especially more relevant with stub-class articles, since it has no regulations on who can edit it in the world.

One thing that I would change about the Wikipedia platform is the aspect that it doesn’t have a way to verify that the information being presented is technically real. I don’t think that this aspect of the site should be removed completely, I think that there should be a way for a program to verify if the sources used are actually credible. If a page or a source had a notification above it or a red flag, a user could know that as they read over a group of information that it is at their own risk to retain this info as factual. Doing this would allow for more ease of mind when using a site like Wikipedia and maybe draw more users on a regular basis.