User:Jiajing Liu/Report

'''Wikipedia Report Winter 2020 Jiajing Liu'''

In the last one month, Salt and Professor Mako tried their best to help us finish our Wikipedia task. It was a brand-new experience for me since I never imagined becoming a contributor. I always thought only those experts have the power to edit Wikipedia. But the course project has allowed us to learn to become a Wikipedia contributor.

After learning in class, I understand the Wikipedia community is a vast family worldwide. Everyone in the World can be a member of the community and make his contributions by simply creating an account and start editing. Wikipedia is officially neutral, and it has many rules as norms to regulate each editor properly. Neutrality is one of the basic rules and pillars of Wikipedia. Participants may be unprofessional, but biases and false information are not allowed by the rules and, therefore, other participants can correct them. Wikipedia provides a vast number of languages to break down the barriers between different language nations. But it is this selfless dedication mode that makes online community management challenging. As we mentioned in class, its model has created opportunities for The North Face. By tampering with the original photos, The North Face has promoted his brand without spending a penny on a world scale. Such a loophole is embarrassing to Wikipedia without doubt, which is something I think they need to improve on.

My advice for Wikipedia is to reinforce their norms to every contributor. Unclear norms will lead to communities to lose focus and ineffective. It will cause conflict between community members. Most importantly, it will not be easy for newcomers to join and act correctly and will finally destroy the community. Personally, to solve this problem, we must start with the newcomers. From cases we discussed weeks ago, the training for newcomers is inevitable for an online community. Although Wikipedia has provided a hand in hand tutorial for each newcomer, it is not enough. I will suggest Wikipedia provide a newcomer examination with norms and actual operation as practices. Those who pass the exam are qualified to become editors, but not everyone. The increased threshold also filters out a lot of unnecessary trouble. I even think the real-name system is a good idea, but it could significantly reduce participation and makes editors of Wikipedia a minority. In this way, the number of people in the community will reduce, and the information available to people will also reduce. To sum up, offering an initial exam is my opinion.

Talking about my experience, it was not that simple as I imagined before. During the article evaluation, I realized several essential points to be a qualified Wiki editor. Factors count, such as whether the tone is neutral? Are there any biases that exist? Is the headline of the article clear and concise? Is the material well organized? If the contributor meets those criteria, then he should be considered a good contributor. So how people learn norms can be covered into the examination, which I mentioned above.

For my project, I chose an article about a classic garden in my hometown, The Lion Grove Garden, in Suzhou, China. I want to edit this article since I was born and raised in Suzhou. The original article is a stub, some contributors have already added the history and design part of The Lion Grove Garden. It is well-organized, so I only added a little background referring to Hui Zou's article, “Between Dream and Shadow: The Aesthetic Change Embodied by the Garden of Lion Grove.” The most significant change I did is adding two templates, the Notable Tourist Attractions, and the Logistics. I planned to add some introduction of major attractions to give readers a more comprehensive reading experience and giving out more tourism introductions about prices and logistics stuff. So, I searched The Lion Grove Garden website and directly added them to the Wikipedia article, but turns out as plagiarism. I must admit that the teachers provided instruction on avoiding plagiarism, but I was careless. I hope the examination will highlight its importance, because many newcomers, like me, probably tend to overlook it.

In the quiz section, I peer-reviewed for two of my classmates whose topics are about Chinese Temple Fair and a Korean music producer named Code Kunst. I suggested my classmate add more cultural backgrounds in different regions for the Chinese Temple Fair article since it hosts in various provinces in China. For Code Kunst, it will be better for my classmate to change the sequence when illustrating Code Kunst's personal life experience. After giving out my suggestions, my classmates agreed with me and revised their articles soon after. My peers also made some recommendations for my article, The Lion Grove Garden. They are interested to see more introductions about significant tourist attractions, so I did researches and add a few more to expand the article.

I did remove my changed articles to the original one yesterday. However, I received a plagiarism alert. That is because I copied pasted some of the tourism information online without change into my words. I didn’t realize it is a very severe problem at first, but it turns out I made a huge mistake. In the next few days, I will try to correct my error by adding more personal generalized information. Besides, I will have a one-to-one meeting with Salt, and I believe he could help me do better.

In general, the Wikipedia project is terrific and helped us practice what we learned in class. Through the experience, I learned how to become a contributor to Wikipedia step by step. It is a big challenge for many non-native English speakers like me. Still, the project is a good practice that let me understand how proudly being a member of such a large social community and made me realize so many people are making contributions without getting payback. Although I still need to learn a lot, I feel grateful to become a contributor.

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