User:Psun23/Report

Wikipedia Reflection Essay:

This quarter I was able to participate and learn more in depth about the vast online community of Wikipedia. I was taught the basics of Wikipedia through training modules provided by Wiki Education. These training modules helped navigate my experience with editing and ultimately publishing a live article. I chose to work on the Wikipedia article stub “Dandelion coffee”, as it was a topic of interest with a great amount of potential improvement. Throughout lectures and the training modules provided on Wiki Education, I began to understand the extent that credibility and reliable sources are pushed upon articles in Wikipedia. This at first was a bit of a shock considering the common thought that Wikipedia is an unreliable source, which has been ingrained in my head since high school. After choosing my topic, despite having read countless articles on the matter, I found it difficult to find Wikipedia approved credible sources. I learned ways to go about searching, and ended up looking at books and medical research studies on Google Scholar. After editing my article sandbox, I was given the task to peer review two of my classmates' articles. These reviews actually really helped aid my own editing and made me more aware of the quality and structure of my own article.

While peer reviews were being conducted, I noticed some irritations and issues I faced with the online community and their messaging system. My peer review link to my sandbox had been switched to an invalid article sandbox that was different from the one I had edited so I wasn’t able to get correct feedback. This small set back caused myself to try and play around with messaging those users and my teacher through the “ping” feature. One area I believe Wikipedia could improve upon would be with their user messaging and discussion methods. Currently, Wikipedia uses the “ping” feature to signal users of any alerts of various sorts. These alerts can be mentions, messages on a talk page, and more. As a newcomer to the community, I had a difficult time navigating myself through the different ways to communicate with others and found the talk page “ping” feature to be over complicated. When trying to communicate with my peers and teacher, I was always hesitant on where the best spot to message would be, whether that was a talk page or my article’s sandbox talk page. To provide a clean and efficient way for direct messaging other users, Wikipedia should consider creating an inbox tool that works similar to DM’s on Instagram or Facebook Messaging. This way users can communicate without needing a specific topic or space present like a talk page. Additionally, it wouldn’t require a specific code tool like the ping feature now, which would be easy to use if a user was having any issues when starting. As newcomers explore Wikipedia, I believe having this inbox for solely direct messages would help retention rates as mature users could message users with advice and guidance if needed. These messages could additionally be great for networking with other users through complimenting one on their work and asking for more information on a less public space.

Continuing to revise and improve my article, I began to think more and more like a user in the Wikipedia community. After feeling lost in the space, I started to pick up the specific language and thought process needed to write neutral and well-informed articles. I believe that Wiki Education helped guide a large portion of the necessary requirements for the class, hence teaching us the ways to correctly contribute. Having clear norms listed out and then quizzed on really helped ensure that as a newcomer I understood what was appropriate behaviors. Having these training modules was crucial for allowing myself to feel more a part of the community, as I was trying my best to follow the rules.

Once I confidently published my live article, I was curious to see how quickly other users in the community would react. Within the day, I received two edits on my article: one for a copy-written photo and one for a cite date error. It was a unique experience seeing my work being removed so suddenly by other users, but also was a clear view of how moderation works within the Wikipedia community. On Wikipedia, everyone is a moderator, and everyone has almost equal abilities to change text throughout the site. This feature is very unique to Wikipedia, and gives the community an advantage in comparison to other popular sites. Even the ability to collaborate with a group of like-minded individuals to revise and improve an article to the fullest is a way of forming a community. Even though I did not know the users who helped fix my live article’s issues, it was an experience to see other people caring enough about a community to make sure it stays as credible as possible.

Another very unique aspect to Wikipedia is its current commitment to no advertising. Compared to other community platforms like Reddit and Slashdot, Wikipedia currently does not allow ads to be displayed on the encyclopedia pages. I find this really refreshing and an incentivizing reason to join the community. Wikipedia is here to benefit people all over the world by giving as credible as possible resources about neutral information. People want to join the community to be a part of something that is truly about collaborating and improving information in a structured manner.

Overall, my experience with Wikipedia was mostly positive. I really enjoyed being submerged into a new community where I could improve upon a topic matter that someone will end up reading. Being a newcomer in Wikipedia could be improved through small adjustments in the messaging realm, but overall was a beneficial experience.