User:Halimnat/Reflections

= Wikipedia Reflection Essay = Learning about Wikipedia over the span of these several weeks has definitely been a fun, exciting and challenging experience. As a person who loves to write, I found writing a Wikipedia article as a new adventure because it is different type of platform. I have always written descriptive stories or newspaper articles, therefore writing an encyclopedia article is something different for me. The first thought I had regarding the Wikipedia assignment was surprisingly not how I would have to learn a new writing style. It was actually trying to learn how to post an article on Wikipedia and knowing how to navigate the website. “What’s the first step? Where is the button for me to create an article?” I thought. In my opinion, Wikipedia has a very confusing layout and is not as user friendly as I wish it would be. There were so many instructions or steps to create the article including the ‘edit source’ function, in which you would have to type in several codes for some layouts are adding infoboxes. Thankfully, they had the ‘edit’ option which is more user friendly way to edit the article.

Challenges
Another challenge that I faced was learning all the ‘Rules and Regulations’ of Wikipedia. Because it is an online encyclopedia, there are many rules that articles have to follow. We need to make sure that the information in the articles are true and comes from a reliable source. After the process of the assignment, I really loved at how exciting it was when I finished an article. After putting up my first article on ‘Batik Day’, I had inspiration to do more articles on other topics. Now that I kind of have an idea of the process, I find it easier to navigate through Wikipedia. The tutorial Wikipedia Game helped a lot in teaching me the process. I also searched online for tips and tricks. I feel so happy when random people stumble on my article. Although only two random wikipedians commented and improved my article, I was really excited to see that they wanted to help out. The difficulties that I had were trying to add an infobox into Wikipedia with the images inside. I found that we had to first upload the image into Wikipedia Commons in order to be able to embed it within the article.

Relevant Chapters and Experience
My experience in Wikipedia in the course material proved to show which issues were relevant and important. First, is motivation from Week 2 Reading Notes. Chapter 2 shows how incentives and motivation work in online communities and uses evidence from a variety of different studies and communities to support its claims. Some examples we talked about in class was Gratipay, designed to provide monetary payments to people who are contributing to various online communities. In similarity, Wikipedia has badges you can earn. It feels nice to see that something you published on the internet can help people out. I loved earning the badges that I got while going through the Wikipedia Adventure tutorial. It motivated me to keep earning badges until I filled up my achievements page.

Another chapter I found to be helpful is Chapter 4, Rules and Governance. Knowing that Wikipedia is monitored, I feel a lot at ease in contributing. I have no worry that people will leave mean troll comments, well, although it is inevitable, I know that the rate of troll comments will be less compared to other sites. I do not like the concept of Slash Dot, which we talked about in class. The reason being is because having a ranking system may be a turn off to several of the commenters, which is not a great thing. For me, I feel that all comments are constructive criticism and can help to improve the article. Chapter 5 also discusses the challenges of dealing with newcomers. Freenet is a good platform because you can be anonymous and work. However, you have to download the application, which is slightly a turn off in my opinion. Users do not like doing that extra step unless they know for sure that they will be committed to using the application.

A chapter that I found to be not as pertaining to the assignment was Chapter 3, which is commitment. I do not relate to this because I like to write on topics that I feel like writing on. Therefore, maybe if there was a guild on advertising topics, I would be more committed to join to learn more information about advertising. However, I would not be committed to the guild in terms of contributing because I still am no expert at advertising. I find that commitment only works if the person is a very passionate person towards the subject. For me, I will only be committed to a guild if I am highly passionate about it. Nonetheless, I love the freedom of being able to write whatever I like. The desire to belong to a group can be motivation and commitment can be an incentive.

Conclusion
Overall, this Wikipedia Assignment has definitely been a wonderful learning experience for me. I learned that it was not as hard as I thought it would be. I initially thought that because it was such a respectable and established online encyclopedia that only people with credentials could contribute to it. However, after taking this class, I learned that anyone has the ability to contribute. I am excited to be able to contribute more towards Wikipedia.