User:Vgs0208/Reflective Essay

Throughout my experience being in this class, there is so much that I learned about wikipedia and how to work with it. During the article evaluation, I learned that wikipedia articles ca change and evolve over time as more information becomes more relevant and available. When critiquing the article I selected which was "Body Dysmorphic Disorder", I approached it by carefully going over the sources, fact-checking the information written and evaluating the overall content of the page. When deciding what to add to the article, I considered the relevance and importance of the information. To improve it, I thought it would be nice and interesting to add cases of celebrities who suffer/suffered from body dysmorphia because its not something that is really seen or talked about through celebrities so incorporating this made it interesting for me to read about which I thought would be interesting to others as well.

When looking at my chosen article, in the talk page, everything was great and there didn't need to be made edits at all! So when reading it, there were no edits I could think of to write/change except to add on more information which I did. Like mentioned before, I added a section to the article page which talked about the experiences/cases of body dysmorphia in celebrities. Specifically, I wrote about 5 different celebrities and talked about who they are, when their body dysmorphia started, what triggered it, and what they. have to say about it to others. By doing this, I thought it would enhance the articles overall quality and provide valuable insights to the readers.

When my article was peer reviewed by a classmate, they gave me a lot of positive feedback! My classmate had said that all my sources and information was very relevant and reliable to my topic and to what I was adding on. The one thing they recommended me to do was to add the lead information part of my article. They recommended this because in my draft, I did not provide them with a lead. After looking at the feedback I realized I did not need to add or create a lead for the section i was writing because since I was only adding to a previous article, I did not need to further create one myself. As for receiving feedback from other wikipedia editors, I did not receive any feedback.

Throughout this experience, I learned so much from contributing to wikipedia! It was a great opportunity to share my knowledge and research. It also made me realize the importance of reliable sources and accurate information in creating articles. This Wikipedia assignments compared to my other assignments are very different. This wikipedia assignment is unique because it allows for feedback from other editors. This is different to other regular assignments I have had to do because the work is public and can benefit more people from different places. Wikipedia can play an important role in improving public understanding on body dysmorphia by providing reliable information, This is important because it helps decrease misinformation and raise awareness and support for those affected by body dysmorphia. My topic may have contributed to address a major equity gap as my topic aimed to address the lack of information and representation of body dysmorphia experiences faced by celebrities. Contributing to Wikipedia made me realized the power of knowledge creation and the importance of fact-checking and citing sources. Through the Wikipedia assignment, I gained a deeper understanding of the responsibility we have on information. This also made me more aware of the impact of reliable and accurate information on public knowledge.