User:Jisbell2/essay

The writing course for Wikipedia has been about learning to write for an encyclopedia, As well as learning to do research that is more in depth than any research you do in high school. It has also taught the students how to navigate Wikipedia and to be more aware of the content on the site. I am going to explain what I have learned in the course and how it will help me through my future education.

One of the first assignments we had in this course was to critique an article, and I chose Cat Senses. When beginning this I had no idea what the writing on Wikipedia should look like and this forced me to take a deeper look into the quality of the writing and see what is considered good and bad. One of the main issues I had with the article was that much of the writing was extremely flowery and not very encyclopedic. I did fix a lot of these issues though on my own pretty early in my days on Wikipedia. While critiquing articles it is much easier to critique an article that had noting to do with me or anyone in my class because it felt far less personal. It was looking at the writing and the overall quality of the article and really nothing else. In the end this was one of my favorite parts of working on Wikipedia.

My main contributions have been The Man who came uptown, which is my least favorite of my articles published. It was a novel that came out in 2018 and in searching for it I found very weak sources that did not give me much information on the novel itself. My largest and favorite contribution is Batouala, which was much easier to to write on as it is a much older book. Batouala did come with it's own challenges though as the novel was originally written in french and I could not read a lot of the content on the novel. The book had many more underlying themes though and the sources were all very strong in regards to what the book was about and how people felt on it. It was much easier to write on a novel that already has a very strong standing in the literary world.

The peer review process was probably the hardest part for me, as it had to do with your own classmates and you were speaking directly about their writing. I always felt bad when it came time to do peer reviews as I didn't want to say anything bad about what they have written. It did come out though that a lot of the peer reviews helped everyone who got reviewed. Everyone was always so thankful about everything you have to say on their writing, even if what you are saying isn't very nice in every way. It mostly worked out that if you were nice about what you have to say even if it it critical it would be well received by me classmates. I was always a little scared when it came time for reviews though because I was scared that my writing wasn't good enough for anyone to read and that everyone would think it was awful. No one ever did though and it helped my writing a lot in the end.

The feedback from all of the other Wikipedia editors was what I was the most nervous about in the beginning because you are going into a world with people who know exactly what they are doing and know that you have no idea. The feedback was not nearly as harsh as I had expected though. Overall it really seemed like everyone just wanted to help you get better with your writing and help better Wikipedia. I noticed this while I was writing The man who came uptown. I broke a very large rule in editing and I wrote an article entirely about the plot of the book and had nothing else in the article. People were very happy to let me know what I had done wrong, but not in a harmful way. They only helped me in the end and the article came out better because of it.

Overall I probably would not take a class on wikipedia again. It is content I am not use to writing on a platform I am not use to using and I believe it really has affected my grade. I do plan on spending more time working on the site though. If you know how to use Wikipedia it really can be very useful in your studies and in bettering yourself. The assignments were completely different because they were out in the world for people to see, not just being handed in to a professor and thrown away afterwords. It really made you think about what you were doing before you published it. It is important because you are learning how to gather knowledge and better the world because of it. If everyone had the access to Wikipedia that we have then it would be a much more developed and used platform.