User:Sariexley/reflection

my reflection


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Wikipedia Reflection Paper
Sari Exley

Wikipedia Debrief

Online Communities

11/22/19

My path to becoming a Wikipedian was one that I had never considered taking, but a journey that I ultimately enjoyed and learned so much from. From learning the basics of what actually goes into creating a page, the work and effort required to be a newcomer in the Wikipedia community, learning the process of moderation on the site, and being subjected to governance by wise Wikipedians. Over the course of the last several months, I have been able to create a page from something that I enjoyed looking at on Instagram into a verified Wikipedia page, where others can look at it and learn more about it. For my Wikipedia project, I researched The Dogist, an Instagram photo-documentary page about dogs around the world that are photographed by street photographer Elias Weiss Friedmann. When considering what I wanted to create for my page, I was initially stumped. How could I choose something when I could write about virtually anything? As I began to think more, I tried to narrow the options down to things that I love and are passionate about, and the two things it came down to were travel and dogs. I wondered, what could combine those interests? Then it hit me—I could write about the Instagram page that I had been following for the last year that regularly inundated my Instagram feed with pictures of cute dogs from around the world! What could be better? Thus, my journey into the Wiki-sphere began. In my essay, I will explain my personal experience of being a newcomer on Wikipedia, how I was received, and my reflection on the Wikipedia community.

For any community to grow, there has to be newcomers. As of 2019, there are close to 6 million articles, so that means a whole lot of newcomers since the site’s inception! Though newcomers are extremely common to Wikipedia, it doesn’t mean that Wikipedians don’t take making sure a newcomer is abiding by Wikipedia rules and policies seriously. In fact, Wikipedians even categorize new members by several different monikers, such as a WikiInfant, WikiChild, WikiTeen, and a WikiYoungAdult, all to describe various ‘levels’ of newcomers. I started my Wikipedia journey as a WikiChild- as Wikipedia defines it- “Wikipedians who have recently discovered, or begun to use, the ability to edit…they may make extensive edits to articles that interest them…they may be inadvertently counterproductive”. This description right in the article shows how experienced Wikipedians can view newcomers—it can be tedious to have to explain rules and regulations to newcomers. Entering as someone who had never even thought about editing or creating an article, and hearing about how newcomers’ articles could be ripped apart or even deleted by experienced users was intimidating. As I learned more about the Wikipedia process and how seriously most users take it, it made me experience what newcomers tend to experience when they perceive that entering a group will be more difficult—I felt more compelled to join. In “The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group” by Elliot Aronson, he notes that “It is a frequent observation that persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same thing with minimum effort”. It seemed to me that effort and potential strife in order to produce a good article would be worth it. I felt that I wanted to prove myself to the Wikipedians, and show that I wasn’t messing around. I also knew that if other users went to my sandbox they would be able to see that not only was I a newcomer, but also that I was doing this for a class assignment, which could further their expectation that I may not put out something that was excellent. This made me want to really analyze and look at what I wrote with a critical eye, knowing I needed to give my full effort to what I was writing about.

From what we had learned in class about moderation, I knew that enforcing moderation on a site makes a difference in how the site operates. In “The Virtues of Moderation”, James Grimmelmann notes that the difference in moderation is that “the governance mechanisms that structure participation in a community to facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse”. Community governance is important for the site to be maintained well, and provide users with ways to help keep the site running efficiently and effectively. When I posted my article, after hearing about how some of my classmates had their articles either heavily moderated or even taken down, I was nervous to see what would happen with mine. My main concerns were notability and potentially disambiguation, since it is a relatively short article with not too many sources to link to it, and there is another article already written about a documentary that was created about The Dogist. As Reagle noted, “Disambiguation in Wikipedia is the process of resolving conflicts in title articles that occur when a single title could be associated with more than one article”. Nonetheless, I posted it, and to my surprise…nothing. Nothing happened, for days! I kept checking to see if my page had been taken down, and mercifully, it never was. After about a week of having it up and checking it every day, I checked my history and saw that my page had indeed been moderated, by three different Wikipedians. When I checked my page history and their own user pages, I saw that they had simply improved my links, added a category to my page, and helped with my references. I was surprised and pleased. They hadn’t seemed to hate my page, and had improved it as well! I thanked them for their edits to my page. I could see how their moderation made my page better. I looked at their talk pages, and both of the users seemed to be prolific Wikipedians, with one in particular having many stars on their user page. This made me confident in my page, knowing that more experienced users had viewed it and thought it was notable enough to keep on the page for people to learn about.

In all, learning about how Wikipedia works and what makes it the site that millions visit every day was fascinating and wonderful to be a part of. For close to the last decade, I have been a frequent reader of Wikipedia, always preferring to read film or show summaries on Wiki rather than IMDB. Whenever I have a question about something, I type it into Google, and more often than not, I am clicking on the Wikipedia article that pops up about it so that I can learn all of the little details I never would’ve known about the topic beforehand. Actually creating, writing, and uploading an article to Wikipedia helped me gain even more of a respect for the site, and entering as a newcomer onto this platform helped me to personally experience several of the concepts that we have discussed in class, including moderation and community governance. These were not topics I had really ever thought of before on online sites, besides some social media platforms, but through this project I have been able to see just how integral these concepts are to be able to run a successful website. Wikipedia would not be the website it is today without its users. Without the user culture that Wikipedia has created, it wouldn’t be a success, it would be a complete mess. Knowing now how much goes into keeping the site the way it is, I feel that I have learned so much about how to be as good of a newcomer I can be on a new site. Who knows, I may even edit or write another article in the future. I wouldn’t rule it out.