User:Winter is coming567/sandbox

 Reflective essay: 

-Critiquing Articles: During the article evaluation I learned to look out for specific points that are critical in a Wikipedia article, such as the tone of the paper, the quality of the sources, whether is it organized into sections, does it possess a lead section, is the content relevant, etc. However, not only did allow me to provide a better review of the article but it also allowed me to keep in mind those key points when writing my own edits for a Wikipedia paper. Thus, it allowed me to have a fairly good picture of what was expected when writing my own edits. Knowing the layout of questions given in the peer review exercises dictated what needed to be added or removed from my chosen article.

-Summarizing your contributions: The edits I did for the Hoei Eruption article delved more into  how  the eruption came to be and the hypotheses attempting to explain the different causes and mechanisms behind the eruption, such as earthquakes or the  mixing through sloshing . The current article is more complete since before the addition of my edits it explained more the effects of the eruption on the crops and population living in the vicinity and the famines, etc., resulting from those effects. However, it never did describe or explain the processes and causes of the eruption in a geophysical way.

-Peer review: The peer review process was the same as the article evaluation exercise where the same layout of questions, mentioned in the critiquing articles section, was given to review my peers' work. I used the same questions that helped me evaluate an article in the article evaluation exercise for my review of the work done by my peers. Questions about the lead, content, tone and balance, sources and references, organization, images and media, and overall impressions. For example, in one of my peer reviews, I recommended that the individual find more sources for his work in order to give it more weight and credibility. One of my peers recommended that I also had more sources, elaborate on scientific terms that the general population may have difficulty understanding or at least link it to an article explaining it and another one would be to watch out for grammar and spelling mistakes.

-Feedback: Unfortunately, I have not received any feedback from other Wikipedia editors. However, if I did, I would respond by thanking them for taking the time to go through my edits and catch the mistakes I've made and also thanking them for any suggestions for the corrections and the overall improvement of my edit. I would implement the necessary corrections and take into consideration their suggestions for improvement. When all is done I will post my changes and respond to them in the Talk section to let them know of the modifications.

-Wikipedia generally: In contributing to Wikipedia, I learned how to properly organize an article and being mindful of the tone, the content and specifically the sources and citations. This Wikipedia assignment is different than other writing assignments for you there is constant access to your work by others which forces you to think twice before publishing anything. Indeed, others can access and recommend changes or perform those changes themselves. Thus, in that regard, this assignment is more exciting than the other assignments I've done, for it starts as your paper but then becomes more of a collective project where others can add their portion and improve the article. Hence, that is how Wikipedia can improve the public understanding of my field or any field by allowing multiple people with the same passion for a certain subject or just liking to provide reliable information to the public to come and work together in producing informative and well-founded articles. It is important to improve the public's understanding of not just my field but in general. The more the public is educated on diverse topics the better society will fare overall. My contribution did address an equity gap, notably Japan. It seems that a great deal of the information on Wikipedia regards the United States and Canada, while not so much for Japan. However, there were no unique challenges in contributing additional information regarding the Hoei Eruption article. Finally, Wikipedia allowed me to understand how much information is available at our fingertips and how it has never been a time more crucial than today to make sure the information is true and comes from reliable sources that have been peer-reviewed by multiple professionals. Lastly, Wikipedia has not greatly affected my understanding of how information is constructed but rather cemented what I already have learned, such as looking for reliable peer-reviewed sources, keeping a descriptive and informative tone, etc. In terms of sharing information, Wikipedia showed just how easy it is to share and edit information.