User:Jeffdnguyen921/Report

Wikipedia Reflection
I never really had any idea that I would become a Wikipedia contributor and add so much to a public domain. I think I still struggled with the digital literacy portion of my article but my skills in research and source finding was an important skill to improve throughout this whole process. I think I still struggled with the digital literacy portion of my article think that there are definitely places that I need to improve to be a worthwhile contributor on Wikipedia but I would love for Wikipedia to take some advice from an individual that went through their whole education program. I am not a new user with complaints instead I am an individual looking to increase the sense of community throughout Wikipedia as an online community.

First off, I loved doing the Wikipedia article and adding information to the article. I worked on doing the Social Studies article which helped grow my abilities in more ways than one. I think first off, researching information, going through sources, and determining what was a “good” source or “bad” source was one of the most interesting experiences that I had to go through. One of the best experiences about this whole process is writing for a public audience. I think that having the writing entire a public sphere instead of the normal private sphere is an important learning curve for future generation. Eventually everyone will have to write for a broad and diverse audience whether that be at work or even through a public aspect. Writing about a subject like Social Studies which is important in the education process of young individuals I thought was important and led to motivation on finding necessary and good information relevant to the subject matter itself. In class, we talked about the commitment process, I remember while doing the whole Wikipedia assignment that I was fulfilling the needs of other people throughout this process. People will use my article to fulfill their needs on learning about the subject and will also fulfill the normative process of looking for information through Wikipedia.

Here are some advice for Wikipedia as a community. I remember doing the assignments and just looking at the number of sub-communities within this overarching community and realizing that this community is a lot bigger than I ever thought it was. Within that however, I have noticed something like the Reddit study we did at the beginning of the year. Topics and articles that are too specific in nature lead to a smaller more committed community, while other topics that are broad move toward a wider yet not as committed community. I think one issue I see in Wikipedia is how hard it is to formulate tight knit communities, because of the encyclopedia format presented, it is really hard to build a sense of unity among members editing a topic. There might be one person who edits once while another edits most of, if not the whole article. The talk feature that Wikipedia has does invoke some presentation of the viewpoints of its members and editors however, I think that having individual to individual discussion with people in the editing process will foster a greater improvement and connection in the community and help the editors. Another thing that I would love to see improved is welcoming newcomers. I remember my first time getting in Wikipedia I got there and was like okay, now what. I think with WikiEd did help with the process in welcoming the newcomers in that format but I always kept thinking what about the people who did not have WikiEd as a process would they be overwhelmed from contributing to Wikipedia, even if they saw one mistake on an article. One way to welcome in newcomers is having a tutorial from the moment they make a new account that helps guide their uses of Wikipedia and the norms.

Throughout the process, I thought Wikipedia did a good job on the editing feature, including a source editing for advanced users and a content editing feature, which is easy use for first-time and novice users. Overall, this is an important thing to do to bring in new contributors while keeping the advanced users engaged in the product. Other websites, like Open Humans have taken this model and used it to foster a sense of community. Wikipedia takes it a step further by merging the advanced users with the first-time users when working on the same articles. Throughout my work in Wikipedia I noticed the innovativeness within Wikipedia. The goal and product of Wikipedia was as familiar as any encyclopedia found in a library or bookstore. While the process and tools were new and involved even new methods to produce something in a new way. In class we always talked about the idea of a familiar product, working in Wikipedia the idea of low barriers and a familiar product really helped attract contributors to its platform. Despite this, Wikipedia has an issue with newcomers to platforms just due to its large base of contributors that contribute to articles. Most people go on Wikipedia to look up basic facts about a person, event, or thing and judging that most of the articles in Wikipedia are already well made with a relative high number of quality sources, a newcomer or any contributor will really have to look for an article to edit whether it fits his or her interest or not. In my case finding an article that aligned with my interests to edit was one of the harder steps in this whole process.

Overall, I loved the whole Wikipedia experience. Now that I have a Wikipedia account and can find sources and research materials effectively, I think there is always room for improvement for me as an individual. I would love to know how to make Wikipedia itself into a credible source material, maybe introducing a feature on Wikipedia like Google has with Google Scholar but that is something to tackle another time.