User:Qaniaf/Report

All throughout high school, I was told to not use Wikipedia as it is not a reliable source. So, Wikipedia has always been the forbidden fruit of the research world for most of my education years. Students and teachers alike didn’t understand the kind of work the goes behind creating or editing a Wikipedia page but after this project I truly feel for the editors. I have learned a lot about Wikipedia and the editing process within the website from this project. It takes a lot more time than you would think and should be considered more reliable than it is due to the extensive process behind editing and creating an article.

For this class, I got the chance to learn the beauty of how Wikipedia works by writing my own contribution to a Wikipedia article. I chose to do an article about the subject of a social media personality, Addison Rae. My reason for choosing this topic is because Addison Rae is one of the big influencers in social media that sets forth in being a role model for teenagers and Gen-Zs nowadays, o I thought it would be important to improve her article on Wikipedia so that people have a better understanding of who she is and what she has achieved to be so popular. Thus, I already have some background knowledge on her so I’ll be able to get a sense of what to write in the article. The article had still a lot of room to improve in which I was able to input information about her relationships, career, activism, filmography, nominations, and several other missing minor details. One factor that became a challenge was to find reliable sources since media coverage of celebrities, especially when it comes to people like internet influencers or content creators is often seen as suspect or self-promotional by Wikipedians. I learned how to carefully identify sources that were eligible which in this case, a lot of them came from known articles or interviews in higher status publications such as national or international newspapers or prestigious magazines because they are considered to be written by expert publishers rather than unidentified blog posts. I also learned how to write in an encyclopedic and neutral tone so that it could be understood by a wide audience. I paid careful attention not to be biased in promoting the subject and to just insert concrete facts rather than trivia facts, or in this case, rumors are not allowed even though it is talked often about a celebrity.

It is a shame that Wikipedia is known to be an untrusted site regardless of the efforts writers put into the articles. Nevertheless, I could understand why Wikipedia has such a notion; even though most articles are written with careful thoughts and considerations, no one can certainly guarantee that there have not been mistakes, biases, nor inaccuracy that has been written down whether it would be on purpose or accident. Even so, these errors can only be brought up by other users who are working on the article and we can’t guarantee that a lot of people will be working on an article at the same time to catch the mistake, so in times that they don’t, readers would obviously be presented with the wrong information. One implementation that the Wikipedia community could apply to change this perspective about themselves would be to have a sort of admin that watches out over the platform, approving the edits that the writers make before it goes into live publication and overall monitoring what goes on. This way, the facts that get written down can be checked to make sure they are indeed correct, thus, it could eliminate the bias, promotion tone, and also negative or unnecessary comments. Just like in the case of the “Slashdot” platform we discussed in class, the site has to go through multiple steps in order for a story to be published where the users submit their stories and wait for approval from the admins. The admins also have control to delete certain contents and merge redundant articles/information. This way, readers will know that the information they’re reading on the site is well-approved content resulting in the platform being a better-trusted site to seek reliable sources.

There was also a mention in the coursebook BSOC in chapter 5 where it talks about the concept of newcomers and it covers the idea of making easy designs for users to utilize platforms as it is one of the important factors that can increase newcomers to join the site because of course, people want to be able to use a site that doesn’t look too confusing and easy to use. In the case of Wikipedia, I got to get the hang of the system but it was because I had classmates, the teacher, and training modules to help me. I think if I was trying to get by figuring out the system by myself, I would really be confused because Wikipedia has so many different ways of doing things such as the different tabs, what a Sandbox or Talk page is, how to edit an article, and so on. So another improvement could be to make the design easy for newcomers so the site can really engage with a lot of users.

In our course material, we touched based on intrinsic motivation which refers to the behavior that is inherently satisfying and interest. There is no external rewards are required to incite the intrinsically motivated person into action. The reward is the behavior itself. This behavior can directly be applied to Wikipedia as people who contribute to the article really do not gain any benefit out of it, they simply write because they want to share the knowledge and that they enjoy the certain topic they are writing. I felt this type of motivation too as I was doing my writing, it felt nice just to contribute to the platform knowing that people everywhere and anywhere will read the information that I have thoroughly searched and draft.