User:JonNotJohn/reflection

The intricate community of Wikipedia can be intimidating and difficult to navigate for newcomers, who may find its strict writing style and academic tone insurmountable-- especially in the face of potential criticism from experienced and dedicated Wikipedians. Wikipedia is by far the most daunting community I have ever attempted to become a part of. The common Wikipedian is frighteningly savvy, armed to the teeth with know-how, in-jokes, wiki-history, and neutral points of view. The users of Wikipedia identify so strongly with the website that it can resemble nationalism. There is a correct, Wikipedian way to do everything, and those who do wrong by the community are an embarrassment -- at least this is how I felt after attempting to write my article of Professional audio.

Let me first delve into my personal experience with the website itself -- outside of the community. Everything about Wikipedia confuses me. To the casual reader of Wikipedia, the website is streamlined. You google something and are then directed to a Wikipedia page, where you can click on key terms that lead you to subsequent Wikipedia pages on and on for an eternity of new and informative content. Users, however, get to see behind the curtain of Wikipedia, and goodness does it get complicated. User pages, subpages, sandboxes, talk pages; even the most basic of Wiki-principles confuse me to no end. It took me 15 minutes to figure out how to make this very page! Every action requires esoteric knowledge of the very unfriendly user interface, the entirety of which is reminiscent of Windows 95 (One of the only things I've actually managed to grasp is how to internally link to other Wikipedia articles, so I will probably be doing that a lot, just to show off).

Now, I am not implying that learning how to navigate Wikipedia is not valuable. In fact, had I invested more time in understanding its inner workings, I might have walked away from this project feeling more confident. All of my classmates except me seemed to have had wonderful experiences drafting articles for Wikipedia, encountering kindly Wikipedians who were devoted to helping them make fantastic articles out of the goodness of their own hearts. To my knowledge, not a single one of my classmates had more than a section or two trimmed off of their articles. I truly do not mean to complain, I now know perfectly well that I did not follow Wikipedias guidelines for writing a Wikipedia article (which was kindly pointed out to me on the talk page of my article), and I do admire the ability of Wikipedians to write objectively and do such fantastic research. As you can probably tell, writing formally is not my strong-suit, and beyond that writing with no emotion or opinion at all seems unfathomable.

For my Professional audio article, I started drafting on my sandbox page, and began to port over the content when I received the go-ahead from my professor. I was feeling pretty confident in my work by this point, I had worked really hard on finding what I thought to be good sources, and I had gotten confirmation that I was ready to go public. This is a link to the revision I added. My article made it only two hours before being completely reverted. Two Wikipedians stepped in to criticize my work (again, rightfully so, but it still stings), pointing out my lack of sourced claims and my misuse of piped links (although I still am unsure how piped links are supposed to be used). I felt overwhelmed by the negative feedback, and as Zhu et al. (2013) would have predicted, I quickly lost all motivation to do better. I had done my best to fit into the Wikipedian community, and it was apparent that I had failed spectacularly. I could not even bring myself to make the changes that had been directly recommended to me. Even now I fear that no matter what I do my work will be reverted.

The comments that I received on my talk page were not as overtly hurtful upon later examination. One of my critics even offered to help if I needed. What really stuck out to me as a newcomer, however, was the utilization of unfamiliar terms, and underlying tones of exclusion. Despite the probable good faith that these comments were left in, I felt that I was being slapped with an RTFM. Reagle (2015) talks about the different types of "geek knowing" in relation to "RTFM"; sharing vs. hoarding. I posit that the most common type of so-called 'geek' (in this case, your average member of any esoteric community) is a healthy mix of both. The dissemination of information in a better-than-though manner makes one both a sharer and a hoarder.

Specifically what stuck out to me in my feedback was the use of the word "we" to describe the community of Wikipedians, not including me (I will acknowledge that tone is hard to read through text, but this was my initial interpretation of the critiques regardless). I also felt belittled when the aforementioned critic informed me that "there's a bit of a learning curve to deal with here." It was frustrating to me that I was so apparently a WikiChild (although after refreshing myself on the definitions I am closer to a WikiTeen now, as this entire reflection is essentially me saying, "Why bother? It'll only get reverted in a couple of minutes" ). I was quite surprised at the depth of the hurt I felt when I received negative feedback on my work. Even more surprisingly, now that enough time has passed, I feel that this rejection was perhaps the single most valuable thing I got out of this class. When my article was reverted it truly hit home to me how much of a community Wikipedia is; how real and substantial an online community can be. I realized that I couldn't just pretend to be a Wikipedian, I have to truly become one. And that means adopting certain etiquette and norms that I am so far demonstrably lacking. I failed to assume the good faith of my critics, and I reacted emotionally. On Wikipedia, as Reagle (2010) noted, "a sense of detachment is sometimes construed as a positive behavior". Next time I get constructive feedback, I resolve to be more like a badger.

It took me until receiving my feedback (and discussing with Professor Reagle) to finally start to understand what Wikipedia really is. Wikipedia is not a collection of knowledge, and it is not even a record of facts. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia cares only for information that has been referenced in credible sources -- it doesn't even care if the information is true, only that its been cited. This was another factor in my ultimate downfall as a Wikipedian. My article, Professional audio, describes a colloquial term. Although I consider myself a Professional Audio hobbyist, the sources on "Pro Audio" are few and far in between, and Wikipedia does not care about my depth of knowledge in the field, only for references made by credible sources relating to Professional Audio. I think I am finally starting to understand that, although understanding and acting in accordance with are quite different.

I do believe that after the frustration of having my efforts completely scoffed at has subsided I will likely try smaller edits, or maybe even a larger contribution at some point further down the line -- not solely because I want to contribute to Wikipedia but because I want to be a part of Wikipedia. Wikipedians are not just users of Wikipedia, but individuals who have become devoted to the website. Wikipedia exemplifies shared identity -- these are not individualistic members with individual goals, this is a community of like-minded people, striving for the betterment of humanity.

Thank you for everything,

Best,

--JonNotJohn (talk) 03:12, 14 April 2023 (UTC)