User:Ayayukichi83

Group Reflection

This Wikipedia assignment taught us components that we would never experience in an essay. Web 2.0 allows our writing and contribution to feel open-ended. Whereas an essay feels “finished” after submitting, a Wiki article invites future change and uptakes. It makes the work more meaningful in our everyday lives and not just constrained within a classroom. Our experience showed us the passion and connections within the community that we took for granted. It is easy to overlook the work that goes into an article since Wikipedia is not the most obvious Web 2.0 platform. We are also more aware of how quickly a state of knowledge changes. New events and updates emerged daily and it feels that an article would be outdated quickly. It became more evident that a strong Wikipedia article would be able to uphold its place over time.

Our biggest insecurity was publishing our article on a public platform where anyone can judge the quality of our writing. This fear was perpetuated when the page we created to assign ourselves to got deleted by a veteran Wiki-pedian. The article genre seemed like a public wall on which people can scribble over others’ scribbles. The actual participation and re-creation of the genre was very new to us. We felt slightly discouraged when a user commented that “[Wikipedia members] are going to have to watch over our Indigenous Canadian main articles ....going to get a wave of student edits” on the talk page of WikiProject: Indigenous Peoples of North America. Wikipedia is an open platform but the public upkeep made our work feel strictly monitored and regulated.

We were struck by how there was no mention about indigenous literatures in related articles. For example, in the article “Canadian Literature” there is no inclusion of indigenous peoples or any description of literature by an Indigenous people, who form the core of Canada’s history and identity. In the “Aboriginal Peoples of Canada” article, they cover cultural expression through visual arts and music, but nothing about literatures. Some questions we faced included: Who is notable of being mentioned? What criteria do we follow to determine which literatures should be included? We were overwhelmed by how broad the topic is but ultimately felt that it was necessary because of its growing contemporary significance.

Now that we have published our article, it feels as if we had created a space on Web 2.0 for the topic which we felt was missing. Our team worked well together by focusing on individual topics and communicated through every step. We did the best we could within the time frame, but given more time we believe we would have been better able to flush out our ideas and polish the article more. We felt that the thorough Wikipedia training was supportive to familiarize us with the platform but there was not enough time to work on the actual writing of the article. This may be because we chose a much broader topic compared to other groups (something that should be considered for future Edit-a-thons) and we had more ground to cover.