User:Yiwen122/Report

Yiwen Hu

Com 481

Wikipedia Report

Wikipedia is a diverse encyclopedic, non-profit online communication platform where people can edit, reverse, and share. Although there are no strict rules on Wiki community, editing articles should conform to Wikiedia's basic norms. After six weeks of study, I went from being a wikipedia reader to an editor. Throughout the study, I understood the norms of the wiki community and applied these norms into my work. In this paper, I will mainly discuss what I learned from class, and my suggestions for the Wiki community.

We spent the first week discussing the rules, and policies of the Wiki community. Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia which is open to the public, and free to everyone. It is mostly written by volunteers, there are no specific rules for your writing, but people need to write in a neutral and respectful tone. Nextly we learned the use of sandbox, where we could practice editing, and save drafts. I practiced using sandbox by introducing myself in my own sandbox and leaving a message in my friend's sandbox. The second week was to find your article. You may choose to create your own new WikiPage or edit existing incomplete articles, also considered as ‘stub’ or ‘start’ articles. I chose to improve a stub article, which was a museum next to my home and the native place of the great Chinese writer Lu Xun. At the beginning, I planned to write about a Chinese celebrity, but it was difficult to find reliable sources of a person, which were mostly self-reports on TV or  news articles, so I reversed my initial decision in the third week while I was editing. In week 3, we talked about plagiarism. The norm of Wikipedia is that you should not use other people's words, copy and paste from others or sound similar, and how to distinguish reliable sources, add citations. Reliable sources include books, literature, first-hand documents, authoritative publishers, etc. The document I chose is from a reliable publisher, it was a tourist website of an authoritative national organization. It has a lot of detailed information about Lu Xun's native place. In the fourth week, we needed to add 2-3 paragraphs to expand or start our article. For me, it was an expansion, I added part of the leading and history section, and also created a new section called Scenic Area, which describes several areas of Lu Xun's former residence. In week five was peer review. Each person was required to review two articles of others, make constructive comments on their articles, and learn the advantages of their articles. My article was pointed out to have too much tourist guide info which was not really related to the article itself, so I modified my content to focus more on various areas within the scenic spot. Last week’s task was to add photos, and images. All my photos came from my own shooting, because lu Xun's hometown was right next to my home. I often went there when I was in China, and I took a bunch of photos. After six weeks of training, our Wikipedia page was ready to go live. These were what I have learned and done in the past six weeks. This was an unforgettable project and experience for me. It gave me a further understanding of online communities, and I successfully edited my first Wikipedia. But there were still some disadvantages in Wikipedia and I want to put forward some of my ideas and construction.

Wikipedia is a well-known, widely used platform, and it needs to be more formal and rigorous. Wikipedia needs to find a professional team to review every post, since many of them are volunteer editors, who may provide error/ wrong messages. In order to create a more regulated community, it is necessary to provide a professional inspection team to review every article, whether the article with the correct tone of text description or use the reliable resources. On the other hand, because the wiki is so extensive and broad, it is not enough to have only one team. It needs more volunteers and people who are experts or dominant on a topic to participate. At the same time, making participants feel like they are part of the community and want to help it accomplish its mission is the key. Wikipedia could encourage more people by providing intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Connecting to what we learned in class, there are two types of rewards to promote people who contribute to their community: intrinsic and extrinsic, Wikipedia should rather enhance the intrinsic interest of the tasks, or provide extrinsic rewards such prizes, good grades, account privileges etc to motivate people to edit. These editors have to go through wiki training to know how to edit articles. After 6 weeks of study I learned some wiki community norms and operations, but for ordinary volunteers who did not take these classes, it will be challenging. Therefore I suggest wikipedia could create an online training to provide detailed instruction/ norms for people who are interested in editing. My other suggestion is that Wikipedia could also collaborate with school departments, invite professors who are experts in using and editing wikipedia to train students to finish editing. They can specifically complete some wiki projects, such as a bio related wiki page for biology department and musical instrument related wiki page for music. They can use their professional knowledge and resources to improve these articles. As a result, for these professors who led the project, Wiki could provide prizes for them, for students who completed the assignments received good grades.