User:Hshibly/Report

Hakeem Shibly

COM 481

February 13 2022

Wikipedia Assignment Reflection

Over the duration of the course so far, I have learned various things regarding the process of updating Wikipedia. Ranging from finding articles that I believe I can find information on and contribute to, to actually learning how to use Wikipedia’s editor to make the edits I deem I should, participating in Wikipedia as a contributor has shone a light on the processes going on behind the scenes. I will begin by directly commenting on my experience on Wikipedia, highlighting what I did exactly and what I learned in the process. Next, I’d like to provide actionable advice on how to improve this experience for future Wikipedians and connect these suggestions to course concepts to demonstrate their validity. Finally, I’ll reflect on theories and concepts I felt applied to my experience with editing a Wikipedia article.

I chose to work on updating a stub-level article on Lupis, a traditional Indonesian dessert. I chose this article because, as I was browsing through the list of stub-level articles on Wikipedia per the suggestion to start there, Lupis was the right balance of a topic that was familiar enough to me and also a basic enough article that made it easy to find lacking areas. The original article did not have any sources whatsoever and content-wise only had a short two-sentence lead with an unsubstantial condiments section following it. After first learning about the high standard for sources and citations for Wikipedia pages, I made sure to do my research on finding some citations for the information that was already on the page. I did this by reviewing some similar articles on Indonesian desserts that were better developed and looking at their examples of sources and also looking at the type of content those pages contained. Adhering to Wikipedia’s neutral and encyclopedic tone as much as possible, I made my updates to the Lupis page. All in all, I further developed the lead paragraph to explain more about the food, I changed the condiments section to focus more on cooking methods and ingredients, supported all my additions with reliable sources, and formatted the article to be better in line with the examples set by more substantiated Wikipedia pages. I learned a great deal about how much work has to be done to accurately update a Wikipedia article like learning the code editor for example, and that there is a lot more communication involved in the updating process than I first thought.

After experiencing what it’s like to update an article on Wikipedia, I’ve found certain areas of Wikipedia lacking in providing a smooth transition from reader to editor/creator on Wikipedia. One thing Wikipedia could do to improve the process of a new editor joining the Wikipedia community is making the actual act of editing Wikipedia simpler. The visual editor allows for relatively simple editing for Wikipedia articles, but as a new user, I found myself struggling with the exact steps I needed to take to make my article look like it belongs on the same site as the best articles on Wikipedia. Templates specifically were hard to get a grasp of—and even more definitively—infobox templates. Having been a user of Wikipedia for a long time now, the infoboxes that provided structured and labeled information on the right of every article was where my eyes would usually go to first when looking for information on Wikipedia—yet as an editor, I found it difficult to update what I believed should’ve been one of my first steps in updating an article. A class concept that relates here is the concept that a welcoming environment encourages commitment, but in this case, I mean a welcoming environment for readers of Wikipedia to become editors. What I (oddly) found to be one of the more rewarding aspects of updating my article was getting the Table of Contents to automatically show on the page after I had added additional sections, and it was rewarding because I felt that my article started to really look like a Wikipedia article now. Had there been more structures in place that helped me make my article look like one of the more polished articles I had seen on Wikipedia before, I feel that the entire process would’ve gone smoother and been more rewarding.

Another thing I found difficult about the editing process was understanding the rules and regulations of Wikipedia. Having the Wikiedu courses guide us through the process was helpful, but I found that having the guides be on a different website made accessing the information a longer process than I thought needed to be. Class concepts of norms and the difference between descriptive and injunctive norms can apply. On Wikipedia, there are clearly written out rules enforcing various things like the credibility of sources but I found that when I was looking through model articles on Wikipedia, I found injunctive norms to be what shapes Wikipedia far more than descriptive and easily accessible norms. Wikipedia, unlike a centralized encyclopedic entity, seems to be a constant “work-in-progress” where norms are enforced by people disapproving of behaviors that are bad. As a new editor, having a bunch of descriptive norms thrown at you that you try to follow, only to find out that other Wikipedians will comment on your work disapproving of your additions and edits is a bit daunting, and a concrete suggestion to fix this on Wikipedia would be to make the Wikiedu courses available more easily on the main Wikipedia page as well as something required to do before updating any articles.

All in all, I learned a lot from my experience updating a Wikipedia page. I found that in this process it was much more beneficial to jump in and learn by doing rather than reading up on rules in advance, and while it isn’t an inherently bad thing, I’ve left suggestions on how to ease new users into the process.