User:Veronica George 10/Report

Wikipedia Report and Reflection
Rhetoric around Wikipedia and the website's credibility has been ever-changing throughout my education. In high-school, I vividly remember my teachers banning the use of Wikipedia as a resource and telling me that "Wikipedia is bad." I've had other teachers that have allowed its use for background information and not as a cited source. Now a student in COM 482, not only are we learning about the website's amazing success, we are also being asked to contribute to the website, too.

I chose to write my article about Blue-Lined Octopuses. I love animals and I enjoy learning about them, so I figured that it would be a good topic to write about. The article was also at a good place in terms development. It was a stub article with some brief information for me to build on, but it wasn't so fleshed out that I wouldn't have anything to add either.

So I began my "wikipedia journey." As a newcomer to this successful online community, I'll be honest, I was really overwhelmed. Writing a Wikipedia article seemed like a daunting task that I wasn't up for. But eventually, I did, and my article is now a hundred times more developed than it was before. The trick? WikiEducation. I don't think I could have done this without it.

WikiEducation is a step-by-step learning resource that teaches students and teachers how to contribute to Wikipedia. It's helpful for Wikipedia users, because it gives insight into what the websites norms and policies are. As a newcomer, this leaves less room for doubt about whether or not "I'm doing it right." I could imagine that feeling overwhelmed and unqualified to write articles for Wikipedia are oftentimes a deterrent for newcomers.

Not only is it enormously helpful for users, but Wiki Education is also helpful for the site of Wikipedia itself, because it does a great job of socializing users. As we learned in class, one of the greatest dangers to an online community is newcomers that break norms. Newcomers that do not have a sense of their role in the community perform poorly, don't commit, annoy experienced users, and turnover quickly. However, it is unlikely that a newcomer that has completed the Wiki Education training modules would break norms, because the spinoff site does a fantastic job of laying the ground rules for the website.

A third reason why I believe Wiki Education is a great tool is because it adds more credibility to the website. If all users were given the opportunity to complete the training module, it might lead to a better reputation of the website. Knowing that the site was only contributed to by trained users might change the minds of those teachers I had in high school, who believed Wikipedia was merely a space for non-academics to mess around and edit articles.

All of these reasons are justifications for why I believe Wiki Education should become an extension of Wikipedia. It would encourage newcomers to contribute to the online community, lead to a decreased likelihood of norm violation, and add more credibility to the website. From what I can gather, it seems as though Wiki Education is only available to people in the education system (and only in the United States and Canada). The mission statement on the Wiki Education website reads "Wiki Education provides resources to instructors, students, and institutions of higher learning. By supporting our non-profit 501(c)3 organization, you can provide more students with opportunities to thread their knowledge into a global network of free information."

Wiki Education is also not advertised within the Wikipedia site. It is not mentioned one time in the "About" section of Wikipedia. I don't feel as though that many people know about it, and that feels like a missed opportunity to me. I realize that there may be obstacles— most likely money— but I wonder if the Wikipedia staff has considered making this investment. If making WikiEducation an extension of Wikipedia feels unattainable, I wonder if there is something similar that Wikipedia could implement into their website that could work to resolve the same issues. A simple guide to how to be a good Wikipedia contributor that is more interesting and interactive than a "FAQ" page could do good things for the Wikipedia community.

All this being said, Wikipedia is surely well-developed website that has overcome all of the odds. Becoming educated on all the working parts that keep Wikipedia alive has led me to disagree with my former high school teachers who believe that Wikipedia isn't a credible source. I think that something the website is doing great at is not overwhelming users with the amount of work that needs to be done on the Wikipedia site. There are thousands of "stub" articles, but with the "quality scale", the "importance scale", and the many "project pages," the completion of these articles doesn't feel completely unattainable.

I'm glad I could help out in Wikipedia's mission of completing all the stub articles. I was able to do so while learning about a topic that interested me and integrating into a very successful online community. This Wikipedia assignment was by all means practical, eye-opening, and intrinsically fun!