User:Madsngo/report

Madelena Ngo

1775270

COM 482A

Wikipedia Reflection Essay

I’d have to admit, when I first sat in this class a week and a half into lectures, hearing “Crazy Pizza Cats” made me question what I was doing. It made me think to myself, what the hell is this class and what the hell am I doing? I was already taking 14 credits and working 25 hours a week at JOEY, but taking this course ended up being one of the most enjoyable and application-based courses I’ve taken at UW thus far, especially in the Communications Department as most classes focus primarily on readings. Let’s just say that taking this course was life changing. With the class being located in the Informatics Department, it made me claim Entrepreneurship and Informatics as my minors this quarter. My majors are communications and professional selling, so taking on Wikipedia and this course made me look at the course with that business mindset. Also, I’ve been able to merge course concepts with said “business-talk” to land an internship with KOMO News! So overall, I am so grateful that my initial thought of what the hell am I doing immediately turned into I know what the hell I’m doing. Truly the epidemy of an opportunity (of being able to be added into the course) becoming the best decision I’ve made this quarter.

When people think of Wikipedia, they automatically assume to never use the site as a valuable source of information. After taking this course, I’ve learned that it is the complete opposite. I’ve realized there is SO much valuable information in (almost) every Wikipedia article and best of all, they include references for us to utilize and make our own assumptions on its validity and what to use. I regret assuming Wikipedia was useless and not great for school; thinking about it now, it could have saved me so much time researching. As we have learned in class, without contributors, sites like this wouldn’t exist. There cannot be simply. “take’, there has to be a “give.” I always used Wikipedia in the past as a quick overview of information, taking information and never contributing. I have never learned its true purpose until this course. Doing the Wikipedia tasks throughout these past 6 weeks have grown my understanding of Wikipedia overall and has been able to merge into discussions in other courses. For example, I have another COM course on social media platforms. My professor is also a Wikipedia contributor and an advocator for Wikimedia! After learning this, it has allowed me to grasp both source concepts significantly better than before. Being a contributor to the infamous Wikipedia made me feel so accomplished, the application-based processes made me feel slightly like an informatics student, hence myself picking up that minor this quarter.

The article I chose in the beginning was called White Coffee. Shortly after starting the article, I realized it didn’t interest me at all and it was going to make doing these tasks less exciting. Going into week 5, I switched my article to JOEY Restaurants, the company I work for and it immediately peaked my interests and made contributing to the Wikipedia article much more enjoyable. Both articles were classified as a Stub-Articles, meaning there wasn’t much information at all, and at the bottom ranking that required much more information, leaving me tons of wiggle room to work with. The JOEY article had some information included, primarily from two sources with one from the website itself, but it needed to be broadened. I’m hoping that I added enough valuable information and formatting to move it up at least two classes on the scale.

When approaching the weekly Wikipedia tasks, all seemed easy to me, even with being behind in course concepts a week and a half later. Much of my peers struggled grasping the tasks, which I easily explained to them, giving myself creditability and assurance knowing I actually knew what I was doing. I took notes from all the Wikipedia modules and used them as reference while doing the application-based tasks. It was informative learning about Wikipedia from a contributor’s standpoint. I learned a lot through being a user and contributor of Wikipedia such as what Wikipedia’s mission really is, what it’s not and how Wikipedia is not what everyone assumes it is. Through the modules, I’ve learned how to successfully build a pretty article through the platform such as adding images, templates, categories, citing sources and references, adding internal/ external links and so on. What I’ve also learned is Wikipedia’s norms, they have improved significantly from what society perceives it to be, which was an untrustworthy site. I’ve learned its norms and values as contributors and the rules of being a contributor are the reason why Wikipedia is everything that isn’t what the world perceives it to be. With this being said, there are some things that I believe Wikipedia should work through to further expand this mission.

I believe that some of the formatting used on Wikipedia could be improved to recruit more users as well as contributors to Wikipedia. There is that common misconception that Wikipedia should never be trusted. With this in mind, Wikipedia should mention the article’s class standing on the article itself. It would make it much easier for the user and contributor to determine its strength as an article. For the user, they are able to determine its usefulness and worth to learn information about. As for the contributor, it would help determine the article’s standing to be contributed to and how much information to be added. Having the class and quality scale on the talk page when people do not understand the platforms makes it harder to be actively involved from both positions from an entry-user’s point of view.

Also with this being said, I believe that with misconceptions and Wikipedia's philosophy, a barrier-to-entry should be a stronger point to address. As we have learned in class, many new users to Wikipedia do not know what they are doing or enter Wikipedia with the intention of sabotaging an article and/or adding bias content that does not have a neutral point of view. Adding a barrier to entry such as trial sandboxes for review before becoming live, or having reviewers review an article before its made permanent could aid in addressing a new user's validity. For everything that Wikipedia strives to be and for everything that they don't want to be (an unreliable platform), barriers to entry should be established with stronger rules and regulations, just enough not to deter those contributors who are significant to the platform.

Another thing I would say Wikipedia should work on pertains specifically to its Wiki Edu page. As students, it was difficult to know whether we have completed the tasks and/or did them correctly. I didn’t necessarily have a problem with this area, but a handful of my fellow peers were very confused and asked me for help a lot. I believe that formatting the Wiki Edu modules in a matter that’s cleaner and has more application-as-you go formatting could make it easier for new users and students to understand what they are doing. A way to fix this would be to have the modules connect directly to a grade of some sort, or have a clear green checkmark. I found this to be the hardest and most confusing part for my peers during the 7 weeks of Wikipedia articles.

Additionally, I believe that Wikipedia should add a rewards program or recognition of some sort for its contributors. Like multiple other platforms we have read cases about in class, each has a specific recognition process for its contributors. Yes, Wikipedia is used by many people and those around the world too, but by adding a better structure to its rewards program could yield a higher number of users, higher amounts of contributions and better quality of work as well as Wikipedia’s expansion overall. Like I’ve mentioned, Wikipedia is a large and world-known encyclopedia; therefore, adding recognition values like how Yelp has, for example, could help the site become better known. Yelp, as a platform, rewards its users by inviting them to special events and treating them well with exclusive dinners. If Wikipedia did something similar to this to reward its contributors, the platform will retain more of its contributors and gain large props through word-of-mouth. During class lectures, we have discussed that contributor/community size matters in the way that contributions and quality of work exist, having a much larger community yields to better engagement and user engagement through motivation. The larger the community, the larger the motivation, user experience, retention, user contributions and so on.

Overall, using Wikipedia has been extremely insightful. Like I’ve mentioned, I’ve based my entire quarter’s opportunities off of learning from this course and Wikipedia overall. It has allowed me to understand platform engagement of online communities as we have learned in class but has also taught me how to judge a book (encyclopedia) by its cover.