User:Sihern Han/Report

Reflection Essay
The most formative part of this whole experience for me was the first couple weeks of class. During this time I was introduced to the course as a whole and Wikipedia as one of the class’s main projects. I also began my on boarding into the Wikipedia community via WikiEdu. As I joined the class last minute without researching the content of the class, I was surprised to learn that the class would revolve largely around contributing to Wikipedia. I briefly considered enrolling in a different class because of what I perceived to be an ingenuine genesis of the course (I had a suspicion that this class was just a partnership with Wikipedia to get free labor from college students).

While I still believe this to be true to a certain extent, I quickly realized the many redeeming qualities of the Wikipedia assignment and the overall course. Some of our first tasks were to explore the social aspects of Wikipedia. Seeing everyone’s unique usernames and making my first post on a classmate’s talk page was very exciting despite the simple nature of the task. I realized that Wikipedia was more than just an online encyclopedia. It is a community that invites people from all places and stances in life to interact with each other in order to contribute to the goal of free information, something that anyone (and especially communications majors) can appreciate. Our discussion in class about assuming good faith illustrated also how Wikipedia is a very welcoming community, which is vital for its survival as a free encyclopedia. This is for most people not an initially appealing medium to spend your time in. However, everyone can appreciate the usefulness of Wikipedia and Wikipedia’s welcoming stance makes it more likely for people to form an identity based, affective commitment and be intrinsically motivated to contribute. Wikipedia’s standing as the number one online encyclopedia is great, but to actually get to see that it is an online  community as well made me appreciate it in a newfound way and made me more interested in Wikipedia as a whole.

Also, going through all of the policies/rules in the training modules gave me a newfound appreciation for Wikipedia. Like most of my classmates, I was told countless times growing up that Wikipedia was not a reliable source of information. I still used Wikipedia in my normal, day to day life, but because of what my teachers told me, I had an unrealistic negative perception of the website. Once I  started doing the training modules, however, I realized that Wikipedia has a very good system in place for upholding the integrity of the encyclopedia. There are a lot of rules and regulations, as well as a system of moderation and team of moderators that work tirelessly to uphold these rules and regulations. I now know that Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia that is riddled with bad information from uninformed contributors and trolls. While Wikipedia can be affected by trolls for a brief period of time, bad contributions are swiftly addressed by moderators. Being able to experience this first hand made me completely change my view on the class and appreciate/buy into Wikipedia.

My newfound appreciation  for Wikipedia made it easier to work on first finding and then working on the article that I ended up choosing, which was entitled “Paradox  of Fiction.” I perused through the many stubs and start class articles (of which there was an impressive amount), but couldn’t find an article topic that I wanted to work on for five weeks. I eventually decided on philosophy as the focus area because I wanted something interesting to research and chose the Paradox of Fiction because it intrigued me (I wrote a 4000 word essay in high school about the suspension of disbelief and it was related).

I quickly realized how difficult it was to make worthwhile contributions on Wikipedia, especially for some of the more abstract article topics. Even for the simplest article, there are many rules and regulations you have to follow for what information you can use and how you can use it. The articles that I looked at during the article evaluations, especially those that are in the Featured Article (FA) class (specifically the Aaliyah article) loomed in my head. The idea of starting was daunting, especially since the readings for the Paradox of Fiction were slow.

I think it would have been easier and overall a more enjoyable experience to work on the article if it was a group assignment. After an initial easy module on editing an article like the “Earth” one offered in The Wikipedia Adventure, a group project would make for an easier introduction to real article editing, supplemented by the social interaction that Wikipedia is made for, with the possibility of incredible improvements to articles due to each article drawing from more brain power. Although this would involve more moving parts and group projects are always risky, I think the upside to a group project would be worth it.

However, once I did the readings and started to edit, the process was pretty intuitive. I was interested enough in my article to be intrinsically motivated (with the help of the external motivation of getting a good grade in this class) to put in the time to relay the information I found to Wikipedia. Although the article is not complete, I am happy with my contribution and hope to be able to contribute further in the future.

Working on this Wikipedia assignment has been a challenging yet incredibly enriching experience. From our on boarding via the WikiEdu program in which we gradually learned the ins and outs of contributing to Wikipedia to the initial introduction to the article editing assignment and our eventual completion of the assignment, as well the many lectures and case studies in which we learned about interpersonal media, I learned a lot and gained a newfound respect for Wikipedia as an online community.

- Sihern