User:Nickyeah/Report

This was an awesome experience for me first time to work on a Wikipedia project. I have chosen my hometown food as my improving topic. My home province has more than a hundred million people, and when I realized that the most famous food and also a symbol of these one hundred million people is poorly written on Wikipedia, I decided to improve it. During the process, I have learned a lot not only on Wikipedia project editing skills, but also knowledges about my hometown culture and the information-freedom ideology of Wikipedia. I firstly want to address some problems I have experienced with the editing process, then I want to address what I have learned from this process. I also want to address the Wiki project with what I have understand with our class content, concepts and ideologies.

When I just started the Wiki tasks it was easy and smooth, but later on the difficulty of manage all the Wiki website settings and system increased as the complexity increased. At here I realized if someone is not a good or somewhat experienced website user, the process would be pretty hard. While going through the Wiki education tasks and 482 classes, I understood the many norms or rules about Wikipedia. These rules or “common understandings” are pretty acknowledged by western society, or in in The United States, but they could not be in the same case for some people from other places in USA or Europe. I am not indicating that the norms and the rules are wrong; especially many of the rules and norms are essential for Wikipedia, such as the copy right rules, etc. For example, when I was editing the article I want to improve, beside that the language and grammar was too rough, I found that many of the citations were not following the copy right rule, such as using advertisement for source. I could clearly see that the previous editor is from Asia, probably form China because I see many grammar mistakes that commonly be used by Chinese and myself. Then I looked a couple more other S level or Stub level, Asian cultural Wikipedia projects, I found out they all have some mistakes about the source using, section formatting, etc. I do feel that they have such mistakes not only because of English proficiency but also not familiar with Wikipedia system and rules. We as student have been trained on Wiki education to learn all these staffs gradually, but they do not. Thus, I recommend Wikipedia foundation and builders can provide a training system for them. Take an example of There is the Help: Your first article website It is not that efficient from what I have observed. Our 482 course Wiki.edu is a good example for people to gradually learn and use Wikipedia, but Wikipedia needs what is accessible for all people not only college students to address this need.

I have learned a lot from information building, sharing system and the advantage of freedom of information. I was learning when I was editing and building the article. When I look for all the sources, I learned new knowledges that I did not expected during the process. Also, I exercised my skills of finding good sources, literature/resource review, and how to determine the trust worthy of the sources. It gave me the ability of critical thinking and I believe it could benefit me in the future. Second, the freedom of information (speech) enables me to find the information I want. In China I don’t have such chances, however on Wikipedia, I can brief learn the information on Wikipedia and I could trace along the sources to determine it and find more behind the website.

The first course material I want to connect to is the motivation. My experience gives me two aspects that related to motivation. First is that the reward/privilege can be built as long as work in the Wikipedia community. Even though we have not worked as much as we can gain some privilege, the editing skills and knowledge about Wikipedia system I have learned already do give me feel reward/privilege. I could and did teach my friend how to establish a wiki page who is not in this class. Another one is relevance which I could work on something that is relevant to me. I do feel rewarded and good by doing the Wikipedia project to let people know more about the topic. The process and skills I have learned would be my future motivation of continuing work on Wikipedia. The commitment for me on this Wiki project is more about relevance to me and my interests. I do not feel so much about community commitment here. The rules and governance concept here are also very important. I believe that the clear and efficient system with appropriate target administrators gives Wikipedia a better competing strength than other knowledge community. I have used Wikipedia for years, especially after I came to the States. The course concepts we learned and the using experience do give me the better say than random newcomers. I do feel new comer components when editing some existed articles, but I could not apply the instant deduction and impact we learned in class.