User:SydneyElise/sandbox/reflection

My Experience With Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an online community that I use all of the time, and something that I have used long enough to develop trust in the credibility of its information. From projects, to papers, to all sorts of random inquiries, I rely on Wikipedia for just about anything. But for the amount I use Wikipedia, I realized I knew very little about its logistics. In fact to be honest, I came into this course with barely any knowledge of how this online community works. My only previous knowledge consisted of what I had heard and discussed with peers. I had absolutely no idea how an online community could allow anyone to make edits and still be successful and reliable. Now, seven weeks into this course, I have a much better understanding of Wikipedia and a tremendous appreciation for Wikipedians. I have learned a lot in the past six weeks (far more than I could ever explain in a three-page essay). But to to boil it down, most of my learning came from the act of doing. Practicing edits in my sandbox was extremely helpful. I also learned a lot from the initial training task. I even went through the training a second time, jotting down notes. Reading about the five pillars gave me a good overview of how Wikipedia works and why it has remained successful.

As I read through the training, I thought about Wikipedia articles I had read in the past and I saw how the five pillars are clearly reflected in the content of Wikipedia. For instance the neutral tone, verifiability and the seriousness of plagiarism. One thing that stood out to me in particular was the level of respect and politeness that is maintained in interactions between Wikipedians, which is something that was emphasized in class lectures as well. The “thank-you’s”, explanations of criticism, and the general positive attitude are all distinctive elements of Wikipedia and what I believe to be a huge draw to the participation of newcomers. Another part that stood out to me was the policy on notability. I read about notability further in depth because I knew right away that I wanted to write my article on the photographer and filmmaker Marcus Haney. I first checked to see whether or not he had an existing Wikipedia page, which he did but it had been deleted (I assume because it was either poorly written or had a lack of reliable sources). I feel as though I was successful in proving Marcus Haney's notability because I was able to find five reliable references to add to the article. Other than a few minor edits, the page remains unchanged. Overall, I am happy with how my article turned out. I even texted Marcus himself to tell him that he now has a Wikipedia article written about him, which he was excited to hear.

Connections Between My Experience and the Course Material

As a newcomer to the Wikipedia community, I found a lot of we learned during lectures to be both useful and informative. In particular, the teahouse page on Wikipedia was very relatable as a newcomer and I really enjoyed Jonathan’s lecture. It was easy for me to follow the lecture and participate because we discussed questions and issues that other newcomers ran into. As I skimmed through the “challenges/questions” page, I noticed that a lot of the difficulties that other new Wikipedia members had were similar to mine. For example, a lot of people had questions about deletions, uploading photos and updating references, which were all challenges I had run into myself. All of the questions were followed by thorough, explicit answers written by the hosts of the page, which I found very helpful.

Overall, I found the material to be both relevant and applicable. I liked that we learned about Wikipedia in depth (an online community I used often but knew close to nothing about) while also touching on a wide range of other online communities in our case discussions. Although not all of the concepts and theories we learned about in lecture were applicable to Wikipedia, they were still applicable to different online communities. I appreciated the connections that were made to other online communities because it helped me understand certain concepts better that I wasn’t able to relate to Wikipedia. For example, we discussed the online community Scratch while learning about motivations and incentives, and we discussed Reddit, Facebook and Farmville while learning about identity-based, bonds-based and needs-based commitment. Overall, most of the material we have learned is brand new to me and there’s very little that I would critique. I have really enjoyed learning about something so new and different from the other courses I have taken at the University.