User talk:Lvlnglafoftneatsteak

My Wikipedia Reflection

A WIKI’d Reflection

First thing first, please do not be taken back by the title of this paper. Yes, the title should be read as “A Wicked Reflection” but does not mean that I view Wikipedia in a negative or demonic light. Rather, I intend to give my direct and honest view of Wiki and the aspects all encompassing of this online encyclopedia of knowledge. What started out as an almost unhealthy love and obsession for Wikipedia, which is evident on my user page, quickly turned into spite and resentment; this is my story. When I decided to take the interdisciplinary class, I was unaware that part of my responsibility in the class would be to become familiar with Wikipedia. When I did find out, I was actually excited. I had heard about Wikipedia through the Colbert Report and so I was intrigued to have this as a class assignment so that I could learn more. Obviously, as a communication major, what I thought was the coolest part about Wiki was its ability to get people to communicate to one another via shared interests of topics and editing pages concerning said topics. What impressed me most was just how many Wikipedians there are in the world. People are on Wikipedia day and night, just waiting to update pages on things that they are interested in. While my edits were few and far between and only included the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and British musician Jamie Cullum, there are Wikipedians who update television show pages as the t.v. show is playing, which I thought was crazy! As far as learning about my discipline is concerned, Wikipedia definitely opened up my eyes to a different trend in communication. I also thank Wikipedia for helping me to learn about other disciplines. For example, it was fun to read what other classmates had edited. While I chose to stick to editing things that I would consider as fun, some of my peers chose to edit and contribute more serious things. Sarah, for example made quite a few edits by helping translate Spanish on some pages of Wiki, while Nixie chose to edit a page on menstrual cups. While I can admit that my contributions were not near the caliber of theirs I was still having fun with Wiki. At some point, however, my love and small yet faithful devotion to Wikipedia slowly dissipated. The turning point, I believe, is when I tried to create a page for my sorority. In my leisure time when I was actively surfing through the pages of this wonder of an online encyclopedia, I came across multiple sorority and fraternity pages. I was inspired and excited because I knew good and well that my sorority did not have a page on Wiki. My sorority is a local service sorority and I doubted highly that any of our alumnae had taken the time to produce a page on Wikipedia. So I took it upon myself to create a new page dedicated to my service sorority and all of the good that we do. Much to my dismay and aggravation, not everyone in the Wiki community agreed that my sorority deserved a page. Within a few hours of creating the page, and before I could finish it, a fellow Wikipedian removed my page and held it hostage. He had written on my talk page that he had removed my sorority’s page because it did not contribute any worthwhile knowledge to the world. I was mad for a few reasons: A) I had spent a lot of time on that page, even if it didn’t look the coolest, I spent a lot of time on it, B) I was angered to hear that someone did not believe that my sorority could contribute any knowledge to the world. So I got in touch with the person and demanded my page back, but there was no winning that deal. Truth be told, I gave up. There were different avenues I could have chosen to get my page back, but I had felt so slapped in the face that I did not even want to deal with Wiki anymore. I definitely learned a lot about writing, considering writing for Wiki is a different kind of writing. Writing for Wikipedia is not like writing a paper, it’s a lot more factual and, as it seemed to me, a journalistic type of writing, which would make sense considering it is a medium. I also learned quite a bit about working with other people. In my experience with my page getting deleted, it wasn’t as if I could just walk up to the person who deleted my page (as far as I know!) and simply flash a smile and ask him to reinstate what I had written. Some jerk that I didn’t even know took my page away and I had to comply with what he thought I should do in order to get my page back. While I walked away from this situation and just let my sorority’s page go, I realize that in life I probably will not be able to do that, especially if it involves my career. Although the aforementioned event turned me slightly sour, I continued my active wiki’ing. For a while, I looked up more information that I thought was fun and informative, but inevitably, my interest for Wikipedia decreased. After the sorority page incident, I started to think about Wiki in a different light. At first I thought it was cool that any person who created an account could go and edit anything. However I was outraged when I discovered that meant that someone could take away my information or something I created. Lesson learned, but I was still mad. So my wiki’ing stopped and I started looking forward to other aspects of the class and it would be a couple of months before I logged back onto Wiki again for leisure. For me, Wikipedia labs turned out to be a big waste of my time. I could completely notice and realize the interdisciplinarity of Wiki and why it was fun and interesting, but even for someone unlike me who is an interdisciplinary major, after a while I think Wiki becomes more of a burden than it does a tool or aid for this major or class. I would have rather spent my time doing more “look busy” assignments, where I had the option to go to something new and different and then have the opportunity to reflect on it in a short paper later on. I think Wikipedia is important as far as the beginning of the class is concerned. Wiki is a fun way to learn about what being interdisciplinary means and even creating an account and editing a few things was helpful and fun, but anymore than a few becomes aggravating. My recommendation would be to keep the Wiki labs as a “starting off” point, but taking it no further than creating a page and doing a few edits. What I wish we would have done more of in Wiki was to “find” topics using others, like how we used “processed cheese” to find “power-law fluid”. I think that was a good exercise where we had to search for ourselves and get from one topic to the other. I believe that every once in a while I’ll log onto Wikipedia and read certain articles or pages in the future, just to see what new things people are saying and how people are editing and contributing to the Wiki community. Do I think Wiki will change the world? I think in a sense it already has. Many students try to use Wikipedia as a source for papers and projects and professors usually dislike that. Students are learning the differences between good and bad sources, even when something like an online encyclopedia sounds like it would be legitimate. As far as communication is concerned, I most definitely think that Wiki is changing the world. Never before have people been able to contribute to encyclopedias in this manner before, and watching people from all over the world getting involved in such a process is actually pretty neat, and so “academic”. I feel that I gave Wikipedia a good chance, both in life and for the purposes of this interdisciplinary class. Something I thought of often was how so many of us are so quick to believe almost everything we see on Wikipedia. But that also got me thinking, just because an encyclopedia is published and bound in a book, I believe what it says, all the while never checking the sources from which the information was drawn or checking the credentials of the people who contributed to the information stored inside. So why shouldn’t I believe Wikipedia, because isn’t that the same thing kind of, just online? Although that theory sounds like it could work, it does not. With people constantly changing the information on Wikipedia it is hard to be sure what is accurate. Without sounding old and stuck in my ways, at least in a bound book I can trust that the information inside is true and stationary, written by intelligent professionals, and that if information does change that I can always pick up an updated copy at the bookstore, even though that costs money and uses a lot of paper. Overall, however, I do not find Wikipedia as a useful tool. Granted it is fun and good way to spend some leisurely time, however for the sake of this class and for academics in general, I do not recommend delving a lot into Wikipedia. Although, I do give it credit for being “wiki’d cool” for many of us to have fun with.