User:Rdispenza12/Reflective Essay

Throughout my time learning how to navigate wikipedia and all of its components, I feel as though I learned multiple new things that can help me grow as a student and person in the "real-world". First of all, I learned about critiquing an article, and what to change about a specific article. When I first chose my article, it said at the top that there was a need throughout for citations to be added, so I made that the first thing that I would focus on. After I made sure that all of the ideas in the article were cited, I decided to add an intro and outro, along with change the wording and structure of many of the sentences throughout the section I chose. I realized that it was kind of boring to read, so I added certain words to at least make it more enjoyable to read than before. I feel as if by changing the things I did, it made the article much more "entertaining" to read, instead of having a very monotone, straight forward tone of voice throughout the entire article. I think the best contributions I made were the intro and outro sections of the article I did. The intro in my opinion is very captivating, and definitely gives you an insight of what you will be reading about. I also think that the outro of the article was a great way to give some perspective on the amount of time it took for change to be made in the United Kingdom, without actually putting any of my own thoughts into the writing, or trying to persuade the reader in any way.

Both of the articles I was chosen to review were in all honesty polar opposites. The first one I decided to review was the LGBTQ parenting, which I thought was very informational and had almost everything it needed, with the exception of a few tweaks here and there, and it was very well written. Therefore, there was not very much that I had to contribute to the peer review. On the other hand, I had to peer review an article that wasn't even started yet, so there was obviously nothing to put there. My peers put on mine that it was the same article as the original, but at the time they gave their thoughts about it, I had only been able to add in the citations because of how busy I had been. I actually almost completely rewrote the entire article by putting my own spin on it, while also keeping the central ideas of it intact.

I feel as though this assignment was similar to other research projects I've done, but obviously not the exact same. In some parts of this assignment, it walked you through the steps very slowly which was nice because at times, I didn't understand what I was doing until I went through the practices and exercises. All in all, I really enjoyed the format of this project, mainly because of the simplicity of the website. I feel as if my article filled in a gap in certain ways. I feel as though nobody in America really talks about the history of the United Kingdom unless we are talking about history long before anything in my article took place. My article spans from the 1960's to the 2010's, and I feel as if the UK is really only talked about in America when discussing much earlier history. Also my article talks about the discrimination in the UK, which I don't think I've ever heard talked about until I decided to do my article, which was very nice because I got to learn history about a problem I didn't truly know existed there. I honestly had no idea how to upload to Wikipedia, or do any of the other things we did in this project before we had started. It was nice to see the process of sharing information to an online encyclopedia, especially how careful you have to be when you want to add anything new to the webpage. It was also a very unique experience because this assignment taught me a lot about this website, which teachers in the past had always said to avoid. So in this situation, it was very nice to have a change of pace, and be able to add something of value to a website where teachers had often prohibited information to be used from.

Overall I really enjoyed this project. Although it was school work and no one truly loves doing homework, it was very nice to learn a lot of new information about a specific topic, along with learning about a website with information on almost every topic there is real information about. All in all, this project was easy to navigate and I'm glad I had the opportunity to learn how to use wikipedia, and contribute information to such a massive webpage.