User:PeterYatesVT/Essay

The English 1020 class that I chose to take this semester was on Wikipedia. I did not know what I was getting myself into when I was starting this class and it took me a while to figure everything out. During this class we were assigned several things to do starting out from evaluating articles, to making edits and adding to articles. Towards the end of the class we were able to write our own articles about anything we wanted. I wrote two articles about two people, one is a wrestler who had lost his leg and the other person was an African American teacher and activist in South Carolina. We also discussed many things during our classes like sexism and racism, vandalism, and the reliability of Wikipedia. I believed and was led to believe that Wikipedia was unreliable because “anybody can write anything on it,” but the amount of protection for articles and continuous support from users continue to make Wikipedia a better place and leads it to be a more reliable area to do research.

Evaluating and Edit
During the first week or so of class, we were instructed to evaluate articles. We were instructed on criteria to evaluate them, a few of these were how they were written, citations and reliability from sources, and also see the edit history of said articles. Next we were instructed to make copy edits on articles that maybe needed revising or additions added to the article. I found articles that were of interest to me, but also had not much that needed adding to the articles. I added to a couple articles and also added citations from which I found my information.

Article Writing
After we had evaluated and made edits and additions to articles, it was our turn to write articles that we wanted to write or that should’ve been on Wikipedia. It was hard choosing something at first because it felt like either something had an article for it already or it did not have enough information on it. I chose to write about the Pratt Gin in downtown Prattville. It seemed interesting and old enough to write about, and there was no article up on Wikipedia for it. As I was trying to do research on the gin, I had trouble finding sources that were reliable, but when I did find reliable sources, they had very little information to garner enough interesting facts. I was able to find some information and put it together to put a summary in my sandbox about the Ginn for it to be peer reviewed. Once it got reviewed, I decided to take another route and do a completely different article. As I was searching I found one person that did not have an article done, it was in the grouping of ESPY award for best male athlete with a disability winners. When I looked up that person, I also found that he took a sport that I was very familiar with, wrestling. As I did my research on him, I was able to pull together plenty of information, but unfortunately I was not able to find much national coverage on him.

Publishing Articles and DYK
I pulled together and wrote my article on Ryan Kocer and decided that it was time to publish the article. After I had published the article, there was one user who said that the article needed better citations to be more noteworthy. But it was decided that since he had won a major award, it garnered enough notoriety that the article was noteworthy enough. A week after I had posted it, I nominated it for a Did You Know spot on the front page. The hook, with alittle revision, was deemed good enough and it was given the green check by another user. After a couple weeks go by, the article made the front page on the Did You Know portion. After writing that I started another article on Mamie Garvin Fields, an African American teacher and activist in South Carolina during the early 1900s. This article was not as hard to write about since she had plenty of sources that were reliable to use and had plenty of information. After publishing this article, I did not nominate it for DYK, but Dr Aaij did and it was given a check. The article hasn’t hit the front page yet but it will sometime in the near future.

Wikipedia
From the time I was a kid I relied on Wikipedia to give me quick facts about either famous or historical people or about events that happened. Starting in my teenage years I started using Wikipedia as a startup source for my research and my papers, but I never used it directly. After having taken this class I understand all that Wikipedia has to offer and also what I have to offer for Wikipedia. Wikipedia gives me the articles to research and topics to look into fully. Even if I was told not to use or cite Wikipedia, the articles should have enough citations for sources that are reliable for me to use and continue to do my research upon. Wikipedia also gives me the chance to give my input on an articles talk page or users talk page to either discuss disputes or to ask questions about issues or concerns. Usuall, most users help others out and discuss matters in civil way on problems about an article or story. What we have to offer Wikipedia though, is that we are able to find articles that interest us that haven’t been written yet but should be written for others to see.

After we finish this class I will continue to use and edit or add articles to Wikipedia. I hope to be a math major so I want to get involved on the math side of Wikipedia. I’ve been searching for an article to write but haven’t been able to find "the one" just yet. This class taught me that Wikipedia has more information than most will ever know about Wikipedia.