User:Lsy2624/Reflections

Seungyeon Lee Com 482: Reflection essay Hill, Benjamin Mako 8 Nov 2015 Reflection on Wikipedia Contribution Editing the Wikipedia wasn’t easy as I expected. Wikipedia had been one of the primary sources that I use to look up. Strangely, I didn’t think the Wikipedia as the online community at first, because Wikipedia is large in size of the community it formed around the globe. Also, it is very organized with thousands of regulations that editors should know and follow. I was only a viewer and a reader of Wikipedia until now. Honestly, I never imagined myself contributing or editing the article on Wikipedia. Despite its difficulties and complexity, it was an exciting and inspiring experience. Beforehand, I had to decide what I’d write about. I expected choosing an article topic to be pretty simple, but soon I realized that I overlooked that how much information Wikipedia already has and knows almost all things that I know. Then, I came up with the topic that is not familiar to anyone, even myself, the new boutiques becoming popular lately in South Korea. However, there was a possibility that it would not satisfy Wikipedia notability. According to notability rules of Wikipedia, “If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list.” I understood why Wikipedia made this rule. If not, there would be tons of articles including articles that nobody is interested in nor read. So, I decided to look up places in South Korea that I really like to go. And there was Heabangchon. The page for Heabangchon already existed and it was marked as a stub. My article topic was decided, then. Through this experience of being a part of Wikipedia, I found my intrinsic motivation. Seeing the blank space filling with my words made me feel some sense of achievement and it filled my desire to share my knowledge. Personally, I have been interested in sharing knowledges about my country and culture. However, I didn’t think about online communities to share them. When I write about Haebangchon, I saw the other town across the Haebangchon called Gyeonglidangil is also a stub. Soon, I found myself wanting to improve that article. Furthermore, feedbacks helped and motivated me a lot. According to the textbook, positive feedbacks can give motivations to people because of their desire of self-improvement. Feedbacks that I received told me what I’m lack of and became the guide to fix my article to make it more like others. Being like other editors is the most difficult factor in this project. Because I’m new to the community, there are many things that I should care about. It is hard to think all of them without anyone’s help or feedbacks. Sometimes, I didn’t even know what I did wrong. Though Contributing Wikipedia experience was interesting, it left much to be desired. One of them was that it is hard technologically especially to newcomers like me who is not very good at technology. When I move my writings into the real page, I had a hard time figuring out how to insert the references into the reflist box. It was hard to edit. There are many help pages but those long pages somewhat intimidated me and kept me from staying motivated. Lsy2624 (talk) 00:43, 9 November 2015 (UTC)