User:Itbag/Report

Critiquing Articles
During the article evaluation, I learned a lot about Wikipedia's expectations for its community members. When it came to critiquing an article, it was really helpful in the modules to be taught what to look out for. I learned about the importance of the lead, which I found very interesting as a necessary element of a good article by Wikipedia's standards. It was made very clear that there was an established system of quality evaluation. There is a community rating system used to identify which articles need work and which articles exemplify Wikipedia's guideline. These guidelines have everything to do with structure, balance, tone, diction, and citing. All of these things go to show Wikipedia's values as an online community. This community was created for the purpose of learning. You can tell because all of these standards are created for the sake of the readers, the people consuming the information gathered in this one place. Wikipedia values truth and knowledge-seeking. These guidelines all lead to enhancing that goal. To make sure that readers have the information they need, presented with virtually no bias and organized in good fashion, without a shadow of a doubt that the information is dependable.

The template was very helpful for me in critiquing articles. The guidelines were made very clear in the training modules, but the template had great guiding questions to go along with them, in order for the article evaluation to be constructive. The template's structure helped me format my evaluations, making it really helpful both for me to produce constructive feedback and the person I am critiquing to review my feedback.

I decided what to add to my chosen article initially by reading through the lead. It was a stub-class article, so there was only a lead and no other content in the article. I used the lead to generate a couple ideas for what some added sections could be. I also used the already cited sources to read up on the topic and see what more information I could glean from those sources, as well as follow a trail to new sources. I added content to my article with the guidelines in mind, trying my best not to plagiarize and making sure that the information I added was important to the topic.

Summarizing Contributions
I wrote the entire article from scratch apart from the lead. So, I added four new sections: the history of status dogs, the subtypes of status dogs, how they're bred, and how the situation is being addressed today. A couple of them, I added on behalf of some feedback I received from peer reviews. They wanted to know more about the origin and also how views have changed over time about the issue. I thought it was important to have information about how they're bred because a major viewpoint on status dogs is that these breeds are inherently aggressive and not fit for society, which is why they banned the breeds. People think their nature is dependent on the cross-breeding and selective breeding over centuries to make vicious dogs. Also, it's important to not how it's being addressed today because it's linked a lot to criminality, issues like animal abuse and legislation. The safety of British citizens is partly at stake.

Peer Review
The peer review process was pretty much the same procedure as the article evaluation at the beginning. We followed the same guidelines of Wikipedia, making sure that our contributions were in line with the online communities rules and expectations. When reading my peer's article, I mentioned about how they could expand on their content. For example, one of them wrote about a social theory called 'group threat theory'. I gave them feedback on how they could expand on the general reception of the social theory, if the intellectual community widely rejected or accepted it and why. I also told them they could talk more about the development of the theory and the research that was conducted in order to form the theory. My peers did the same thing for me, as mentioned before, about how I could build on the history and also the viewpoint of today, what's being done about the illegality of status dogs in the UK.

Wikipedia Generally
I learned a lot about Wikipedia that I had not known about the platform before. I had such a different view of what it was all throughout grade school because it is infamous for its unreliability. Many people think that this site has so much worthless information that goes unchecked simply because anyone can edit. But, the members of this online community that actually contribute have so many guidelines to follow that ensure this site to be a worthy source. I think because the system in place and the community standards aren't made very known, this is why Wikipedia seems to have that reputation. I think something that Wikipedia would work on is its design of the user experience. I was able to learn more about this site through a class at my university, but otherwise, I am fully confident that I never would have contributed to this community. Part of what has to do with that is the UX design. I think the usability of the site could be drastically improved. The way that the accounts work, how you track articles, make contributions, send messages, using Wikicode, learn how to find articles that need improvement, all of these things seem to be things that require prior and intimate knowledge of the platform to begin with. I had to go through modules of training just to figure out how to do something once, and I still found it confusing. Trying to do the same thing again requires me to go back to the module and do it over again to remember. If the platform was redesigned and the functionality was more conventional to other content contributor platforms, I think the engagement of the site would skyrocket. I am happy that Wikipedia encourages contributors to be bold, though.