User:Hypermole115/New sandbox

Reflective Essay

During my time on creating my article, I learned that that Wikipedia articles involves several steps in order to be published and reviewed by others. I learned that Wikipedia has very specific guidelines and notability criteria so that it is important for every article to follow and meet requirements. When doing my article evaluation, I decided to ensure that it is an article that people may or may not have heard about, Covet, which is a band that I have been following for a while. I thought of this because it is simple for me to get some background about this article from different sources that uses interviews and reviews from journals and questionnaire to further authenticate the reality of this article. It was difficult because not a lot of these journal websites are fully expert publishers although they do provide a lot of context to what they want to say upon reviewing or questioning the band.

Some of my edits came down to simply creating a format of how he article would look like. For example, I decided to make edits that included changing the structure of the article by instead of having tables or outlines of band members from Covet from previous band members to current band members and also giving a timeline on when they were present and left the band. Other edits was grammatical edits since I wanted to ensure that my article looks presentable and can make sense when a reader is going through the article. Finally I ensured that I edits some things that my peer reviewer suggested me to edit some pieces of the article such as structure and paraphrasing of the article. I felt that these were valuable additions to the article because they taught me on how to create a better writing process that have several important purposes when creating a high-quality article. I learned that clarity and coherence is essential because editing helps to ensure that the ideas that I have are expressed clearly and coherently. Others are grammar and spelling to ensure that my edits help catch and correct grammatical errors, spelling mistakes and maintaining credibility on my writing. As well I had to be consistent on my edits to meat the terms of language, tone, and style throughout the article.

With peer reviews, I liked how we each got a partner and were able to communicate with each other to further help out and evaluate our articles to ensure that we get perspective on how we write and create articles. It is a learning opportunity for both the author and the reviews that peer reviews are valuable processes so that authors can gain insights into how their work is perceived, whereas the reviews can stay informed on the latest research they read and use that knowledge to help out the author. I had the opportunity to also be a peer reviewer myself as I helped out my parter on his article by improvement of clarity and presentation. I suggested some edits that he should do by making a structure of his article on different formats he could use instead of just only using paragraph separations. It also allowed me to provide more feedback on identifying errors and flaws on articles such as not having biased opinions and ensuring there is validation when researching a topic in order to provide that in my peer reviews as well as my other peer reviewer.

I did receive feedback from Wikipedia editors. I handled it okay as my article was not ready to be published because Wikipedia moved my article to the draft space because it was not under the category for music and I needed more sources in order to push it out from the draft space. I still need some help on figuring this out and I was wondering if it's still not too late to further work on my article before the end of the semester.

I learned that it takes a lot of time to come up with an article that you would want to talk about in Wikipedia. I feel that even though Wikipedia is an open source, a lot can be restricted if people don't follow guidelines and policies that people need to familiarize themselves in. Wikipedia assignments are more freely and can be done at your own pace as it is your own topic to write about although you have to be consistent and careful when writing about your article rather than an assigned article since assigned articles need more research and time to understand its field and topic. Wikipedia is very useful in the public as anyone is free to use the site, although it can have some cautious areas as anyone can edit the article they read and ensure that everything is formatted corrected and have reliable sources. It's important to improve public understanding in our field because a lot of people think that Wikipedia is not a good reliable resource but it can still provide useful information on any topic to get more insight. I believe that my contribution may have addressed some equity gap as one of the band members from Covet has her own Wikipedia article about herself and not about the band because I believe that the author herself wrote the Wikipedia article on herself only and not the band. Therefore, I wanted to do the courtesy on writing about the band so that other people would get more information about the band's history, band members, discography, and the gear that they use. It was challenging because I needed to branch out to different sources to get more information about the band but also had some help by looking at the band member's Wikipedia to see what sources and references they used to create their article, but also using other article to create mines as well.

The Wikipedia assignment did affected my understanding on how information is constructed and shared because Wikipedia articles can be very sensitive when it comes to creating your own articles and editing them as editors, policies and guidelines are very strict but essential. It has to be fair to follow them so that Wikipedia ensures that the topic a person is writing about meets the requirements to be significant enough to become a Wikipedia article. I understood my role in today; information landscape by seeing how common websites like Wikipedia can have large impacts on getting information on a day to day basis and ensuring that there is no false information, neutral tone, and cited sources. Additionally, my role is important as that I can relate to others to write whatever topic I want as long as I meet the criteria.