User:Sydneys92/Wiki Reflection

All through middle school and high school, I had always been told that Wikipedia was not a valid source. My teachers never really went into detail about why, they just told us to never use it as a source for papers and reports. In Online Communities, I was able to understand why. People are able to edit Wikipedia, even if they do not actually know anything about the topic. For example, around the "deflate-gate" scandal with the New England Patriots, Rob Gronkowsi's page claimed he was a member of the “Deflatriots”. Anyone who signs up to be a member of the Wikipedia community can edit any page they want and change it. However, Wikipedia's strong governing members are able to correct these changes very quickly. While some people use Wikipedia to edit things as they want, the community is a great place for collaboration of the topics on the website that create a good online community. Through working within Wikipedia and creating the Road Signs in Australia Wiki page, I have been able to truly understand what goes on in a website I have had access to for years.

RTFM and Newcomers

In this class, I was introduced to Wikipedia as a newcomer. I had to do the Online Student Orientation training that explained how to use Wikipedia and what is appropriate or inappropriate. The Online Student Orientation aspect helped bring the idea of RTFM, or Read The Fine Manual, that we had learned in class. As a newcomer, I always thought I was going to mess something up, so I always tried to make sure to check back to the hints and cheat sheet pages, but sometimes I would still not do something correctly. At this point, I still do not feel super comfortable in the Wikipedia environment, but I assume that comes with time.

Being a newcomer to Wikipedia, I was able to collaborate with other Wikipedia users and was able to have other more experienced users help me with my page. According to Professor Reagle in Good Faith Collaboration chapter, Wikipedia is a “networking technology” and that “its related collaborative techniques can enable openness and accessibility (e.g., discussion lists, distributed software development, and wikis), furthering accountability and the socialization of newcomers.” The idea of collaboration really relates to the idea of being a networking technology because people were able to speak with other Wikipedians to work on specific pages. Through collaboration, I was extremely thankful to have so many users helping me with my page. Wikipedians helped me by adding things to my pages and fixing things that did not make sense.

Experiences

On my page, I was a bit eager, and tried to post over 300 images of road signs along with their information. After about ten, I realized this wasn’t going to happen, since you would have to download all of the images from your source websites and then upload them to Wikipedia commons, then bring them to the sandbox. After speaking to Professor Reagle, I ended up only doing around thirty or forty of the 300 images but all of the explanations of each road sign. I kept the rest of the empty road signs on the move from the sandbox to the actual page, in hopes that I would get to them at some point.

However, someone came in and added everything! User:101.166.195.231 added all of the images I had left empty and also helped with the wording of the explanations. They helped add many images, but one of the larger differences is seen here. This was extremely shocking. I knew how long that these few images took me to do; I was curious how long it must have taken them. I began poking around their page and their User Contribution history and it seems like they are very helpful in many Road Sign pages ([1]), including “Road Signs in Thailand”, “Road Signs in Malaysia”, and “Road Signs in New Zealand”, just to name a few. By seeing this, I would assume they have all of the images already and are able to just take them from Wiki Commons and bring it to other websites. Whatever it may be, they were extremely helpful in completing the tedious task of adding images to every description of road signs. Another user who was also very active on my page was User:Imzadi1979. This user was active on my talk page, adding comments of things that I could work on, specifically tone issues, the naming of columns, and image sizes. Looking at their user page, they are also extremely involved in editing pages relating to driving and highways. They have received many Barnstars while working on different Road pages as well.

Overall, my experience within Wikipedia was pretty interesting in both a good and bad way. My page was considered to be “within the scope of WikiProject Australia”, which was created in hopes to add Wikipedia coverage of Australian topics, which made my page seem pretty important. However, my article had also been rated as “low-importance” on the importance scale, which seems somewhat counterintuitive. While I had many people helping me during my time with Wikipedia, that seemed to change the day I posted my Wikipedia reflection link. I got an alert that my page was nominated for Speedy Deletion! I originally thought that it was for my “Road Signs in Australia” page, but after digging some more, I realized that it was just because my reflections page was not exactly how it should be. The user who nominated it told me that it was a blog post and it was going to be deleted. From the help of user:nucomm23, I was able to make the page the correct way so it wouldn’t be deleted. Being a newcomer to the website, I was also struggling with understanding how certain language was appropriate or not and also how to link things. The cheat sheets were helpful, but it took a while to understand how everything worked.

Final Thoughts

I am not sure if I will be making new pages for things as a hobby now, but I was very impressed that there are so many Wikipedians who are helping create and edit pages all of the time. I believe I would feel somewhat comfortable editing other peoples pages in hopes that they could be better pages, but I think creating one on my own is a bit of work for something that could potentially not be as important as I thought it was and end up being deleted. For Online Communities, however, I think it was a great way to get involved in a community that I was not exactly used to. While I had some setbacks along the way, I think my final Wikipedia page turned out a lot better than I expected.