User:Stellasun666/report

Wikipedia Assignment Reflection

Stella Sun

In this seven-week study experience with Wikipedia, I firstly had a chance to understand more about Wikipedia and was able to edit my first article on Wikipedia with “pressure” of completing course assignments. At first, I took this Wiki assignment just as a normal school assignment, but when I was engaging in this process of editing articles, I felt like I had responsibilities to share my knowledge clearly and precisely to people all over the world. Before I started editing, I always doubted myself that as an international student, if my English writing skills are qualified for an online encyclopedia? Will Wikipedia need scholarly words and phrasings? Will my knowledge be useful for Wikipedia? After the seven-week study, my doubts had eliminated and I enjoyed the process of contributing a lot.

At first, I had two preferred articles to edit: Tanghulu and Luckin Coffee. When I knew the copyright limitations of adding images, I chose to edit Luckin Coffee. Because my sister is working in Luckin Coffee and she could help me to take some original photos as Wiki images. After choosing the topic, the process of editing made me realize that as a Chinese people, I was able to collect information from Chinese primary resources and rewrote them in English. Also, I could read English resources which might have different perspectives with Chinese media about Luckin Coffee. The ability to acquire comprehensive information about Luckin Coffee made me have more confidence in editing the article precisely. I spent a lot of time searching for reliable information and I planned to write the history of Luckin Coffee from 2018 till now and talked about its special mode of business operation. Luckin Coffee is a new company and it had a lot of action in the past two years. Searching the past news and organizing them in chronological order is a little bit challenging for me. I tried to search annual summary articles and Youtube videos of Luckin Coffee to create a timeline of its actions. Then, I searched keywords to find reliable sources that can present each action they made and cite them in the article. The process of finding and collecting information not only helping me to contribute to Wikipedia but also prompt me to learn things about current situations of Chinese markets and customers. Moreover, I made a mistake when I tried to move my article. A wrong click made my user name Stellasun666 appeared on the topic of Luckin Coffee and I did not find a way to recover it. To be honest, I was ashamed at that time because I did not read the instructions for moving articles carefully. Luckily, an administrator helped me to recover that page and this embarrassment made me more careful to my every action.

I believed that many newcomers and free-riders of Wikipedia would have a similar experience with me. Although the edit button is obvious on each Wiki page, people who do not think they are knowledgeable or do not have the confidence to revise others’ work will not click the edit button in their whole lives. Therefore, based on my Wikipedia journey, my advice to Wikipedia community is: sending editing notifications about users’ interesting topics and enhancing their confidence to edit articles. My first advice is cooperating with Google or other tech companies to acquire users’ preferences. When I did the peer review exercise, I noticed that most of my Chinese classmates preferred to edit the articles related to Chinese culture and many other students chose to edit locations or events they were familiar with. According to the motivation and incentives that we talked about in the first class, making newcomers and free-riders find stub articles they are interested in easier will motivate their participation. For example, if Wikipedia knows I am from China and I love music, they can send an email to me and tell me there are many Chinese culture stubs and music stubs need to develop. Or they can push simple and clear notifications of stubs that I might be interested in when I use Wikipedia. The interesting stubs will increase my intrinsic motivation to make the first-attempt contribution in this community. The second advice is finding ways to enhance free-riders’ confidence and making them realize everyone has the ability to share useful information. Wikipedia can recruit volunteers to make promoting videos about how they started their Wikipedia editing, maybe started from one image, one typo revise or one sentence. Other people’s experience will enhance people’s intrinsic motivation to take their first step and increase participation in the future.

We are in an era of information and I always remind myself to know more useful and valuable information. Wikipedia community is a good place to make an output of information and receive valuable knowledge as input. Through my development from a free-rider to a newcomer, I got different perspectives and feelings on Wikipedia. I saw people’s efforts through the button of “view history” and I received people’s kindness after I made mistakes. These positive experiences will prompt me to edit more articles in the future and participate in this community more often.