User:YoBenAgain/Reflective Essay

This class throughout this semester was interesting. I have never really thought about how much time and effort it takes to create a Wikipedia page. I have always thought it was created using AI or the Wikipedia employees create a page about something. I also thought it was created by an author similar to how an author just creates an article but never really thought about how anyone was able to edit it afterwards and a lesser fact that they can make it completely irrelevant to the actual topic if they decide to mess it up. I have opened a new perspective for the people who have to thoroughly research about a topic to turn into a Wikipedia because the facts about that said topic has to be most likely true with multiple sources confirming it.

Around the start of the semester, I thought creating a Wikipedia article was not going to be that difficult. It turns out creating a Wikipedia page is harder than I expected to be. The first problem I encountered was trying to find a topic to write my Wikipedia article about. I did not really know what to write about since there is a Wikipedia page for almost everything I can think of such as movies, video games, books, people, places, products, websites, or events in history. I almost had no idea what to write about and was completely stumped because there was almost nothing new I could write about since almost everything was taken. I resorted to finding topics that were really obscure that there was almost no known information about which could potentially work since it was highly unlikely that there would be a Wikipedia article about that obscure topic. However another problem arises as if I wrote about an obscure topic, then it would be really hard to find any public or official information about that topic, so I was basically in a dilemma about what exactly my topic should be on at first. I have also thought about writing about topics that explain current events or events that happened this year but unfortunately there were Wikipedia articles about them already. It was surprising how fast Wikipedia articles get created or updated as fast as a couple hours after the event had happened which became hard to try to pick a current event topic.

I finally found a topic to write about which to my surprise had no Wikipedia article because I wrote about a person who is actively present on a YouTube channel of a very popular game. However, another factor that was unexpected was the lack of information about that person I was writing about, which is surprisingly not much, not even their last name is public. My  sources were limited when researching about this person but there were a couple videos from the person themself explaining their past. It was somewhat difficult to try to explain the important aspects of the person’s life and I was trying to avoid any unnecessary information in the article while also trying to talk about the important information so a reader who has no idea who this person is understands who this person is and what they do for a living.

When trying to create my article on Wikipedia, it was honestly a lot more difficult to figure out how to use the sandboxes than I expected. I knew some parts of the Wikipedia sandboxes because it works like Google Docs such as font size and holding the text, but there were other features that I had no idea how to use and even what it did. For example I had no idea how to add citations so it honestly took a while to figure out how to do it. I thought staying neutral when writing our articles was not that hard because we just had to write an article to inform readers, not prove a point in an argument. When we were editing each other’s articles, I liked that we were all reading each other’s articles because at least I can get some feedback on what I need to fix to make my article better.

In conclusion, I think creating a Wikipedia article was an interesting experience because I have never really thought about how much work goes into creating a Wikipedia article. I did not realize how hard it is to find a topic to write about because there is a Wikipedia article for almost everything I could think of. When creating an article for something that did not have a Wikipedia article, it became difficult to find enough sources that could at least be credible enough to be used in my Wikipedia article. It was not that difficult to stay neutral as we just had to relay information that we have found about our topic. The hardest part was finding enough sources that could be presented on Wikipedia. Now when I see Wikipedia, I will now look at them differently about how much time and hard work goes into creating an effective Wikipedia article.