User:Toaddoesnot/sandbox

= Reflective Essay = Before this course, I used Wikipedia quite often and knew about the possibility of open contributions, but never thought that I am “qualified” enough to make edits. It felt really intimidating to add any information to the encyclopedia because the articles I saw were extensive and well-written, and I couldn't imagine a single piece of information I can add to make it better. As I started the course I learned that articles that I usually find do not represent the whole Wikipedia, and there are thousands of pages rated as low as a “stub” that can be majorly improved. When I reviewed those pages and understood that I have so many thoughts about them, my fear of contributing has gone. I learned that people volunteering for Wikipedia do not have any qualifications or secret resources just like I don't and that you only need time for the research to make a good article. Moreover, the idea that my contributions are as meaningful as others was reinforced after the lesson about the equality gap that stated that more perspectives and diversity create essential neutrality. However, it also made me even more doubtful and critical about the information on the Internet. The open collaboration model is maintained by people who are still biased and prone to making mistakes and creating inequality: if this model is not moderated, it will never be fair naturally. That is why even though Wikipedia gives all people in the world a right to contribute staying anonymous it still became dominated by the male population from Western countries and particular citation sources.

This assignment of the course was very different from my other assignments that are usually based on research. Even though the research suggests relying on lots of sources, there is still a very important part for your own hypotheses, source management, and conclusions to reach a persuasive effect, which is unsuitable for Wikipedia. The editing in the latter is more about searching than about writing and thinking, so the process of working on my article didn't look like anything I've practiced before as well. Another significant difference is that I used to write my game design specialization papers for the people who are concentrating on games as well or at least have a basic gaming literacy. The main target audience on Wikipedia are people who have zero knowledge on the topic and, based on how many game-related Wikipedia articles have low-quality scores, on the area in general. Even though I knew a lot about some topics, I couldn't just add my explanation because it wouldn't be universal, so it made me look for original sources of my knowledge that I forgot over the years. It made me understand the value of artistic statements and company philosophies because even if people do the same thing terminology-wise, they still can their own perceptions and beliefs that create unique representation.

The article I was editing was “Hypercasual game”. I wanted to connect the video game industry I study to enter, the problem of representation of women in gaming I care about, and the role of Eastern European developers I want to highlight. Hyper-casual game is a type of mobile video game represented by a lot of popular titles, taking almost 50% of the mobile game market, and one of the very few video game types that are played more by women than by men. While it does not directly address the discrimination, the absence of this information on the Internet adds up to the whole picture of the gaming world for non-gamers and makes people who are a significant part of it invisible. While evaluating this article the biggest issue I found was that it was very small, and because studies of hypercasual games are rather new and narrow, there weren't many reliable sources included either. My main goal was to expand the article as much as I can while still relying on proven information only; my main approach to the choice of sections and the information to add was to look up similar Wikipedia articles that meet the quality standards.

Summarizing my contributions, I moved the pieces that were included briefly in the history into separate paragraphs and supplemented them with more text, which made the article have three more full-length sections. I also added a lot of citations and additional resources that were lacking, as well as images that were not present at all. I also added demographic information and notable developers worldwide to meet the objectives I had, and edited language in existing sections, getting rid of subjective statements and essay-like style. Peer reviews helped me to shape a trajectory and prioritize more important areas as I initially planned a bigger scope for this article but had an affordance to only add that little. I tried to do the same in my own peer reviews and evaluated articles based on the Wikipedia standardized checklists. Lastly, even though my reviewed article didn't address a major equity gap specifically, I did get a chance to participate in the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. During that time, I was making little edits like anchoring and adding hyperlinks to the biography of a talented artist Pryde Brown who has raised other creative women. I hope that our collective effort during that event would help this amazing family to stay undeleted and that my overall participation in this course made at least a tiny part of Wikipedia more diverse and fair.