User:Ayi1016/AYIReflectionpaper

Wikipedia was a very challenging project for me because I have never experienced the site other than searching for entertainment aspects. I was stereotypical regarding Wikipedia because I thought it was a site for anyone and everyone to contribute without having any type of restrictions. However when I came to contributing myself, I was very surprised at how complicated and handful it was to write article. Yet, it was not an easy task, I learned a lot about Wikipedia I had no idea there were so many people behind the site and how many restrictions and rules were included.

For my Wikipedia article, I decided to write about Beauty Standards in Korea. Honestly, choosing to write about Korean Beauty Standards seemed to become overwhelming as I started to make progress on the article itself. It was hard to stay neutral based on the fact that I did have some knowledge regarding the topic and the references I found were not neutral either. I even had some times where I really wanted to change my topic because I was receiving notifications and comments that were intimidating and stressful to understand. I think one the biggest struggles was the notifications of someone “patrolling” my article. First of all, I had no idea what that meant and when I did my research and saw the potential of my article being deleted I stressed out even more from previously being stressed with the topic. Contributing to an online community with the three approaches of persuasive techniques: potential contributors, finding things easily, reaching out. Supporting intrinsic motivators: having fun and extrinsic rewards: being rewarded for the work and effort at first did not apply to me but getting to understand Wikipedia just a little more did help my anxiety.

I think Wikipedia is a strong site with many good qualities and that is what motivates the Wikipedia community to be maintained and to be continuously expand. Aside from Wikipedia itself, I personally felt the norms were absent because I had issues focusing on the community. It is not Wikipedia that made me feel this way but as I was creating my own article I did leave with some questions in why it was hard to engage to such a large and strong community. I think mainly it was the fact that a lot of issue arose while I was trying to create content. When I was “patrolled” I really had no idea what that meant and automatically the word “patrol” to me was very intimidating. I think a clearer explanation from the person who patrolled me or at least a description along with the notification through Wikipedia would have helped me a lot when working through this article. In the aspect of reputation systems, I think Wikipedia is doing a good job to make sure bad behavior is being prevented. It gives trust to us as contributors to continue contributing because it can mean that our creations are being protected and even respected so that nothing comes in our way. However, as a newcomer I was overwhelmed to intake so many unexplained notifications and I think my anxiety grew because I was able to receive the concerned notifications right away but when there were times when I received good feedback because I didn’t see any notices I was only able to discover those when I was working on my article or closely monitoring the site. At the same time I realized that I was not able to receive the good feedback because it was mostly coming from my fellow classmates that consists of newcomers. In that sense, I think Wikipedia should create a notifications to users to leave a ticrediting themselves would not be as hard compared to a newcomers who has to learn a lot as their contributing to the site.

Another hope I have towards Wikipedia is to decrease the amount of codes and styles when creating content. Although there are clear directions and some make sense write away like bolding, making headings and more but my experience with editing was very rough. It took me a while to grasp on how to follow the right directions Wikipedia is asking for. When was trying to cite my sources I made a mistake by adding my sources onto to end of my article instead of adding the citations between the text. I was very lucky that there were helpers who corrected my mistake and when I was trying to fix them, I had to look over the Wikipedia tutorial and do a lot of research in how to move around my citations or delete them to input back to the correct places. When I tried deleting the citations did not go away but rather was indicated as a blank citation. So when I tried to look up on how to properly make these changes the directions were asking for specific ways to do it. This process was very confusing and took a while to figure it out.

Overall, Wikipedia really helped me grow as an online contributor. The process was rough but I was able to experience this community and find out about things I didn’t even imagine. As I mentioned, I thought Wikipedia was free to use for anyone without any restrictions but through this project I was able to gain much more trust to create my work because there are contributors who are able to help me improve and learn. I think the biggest lesson I got out of this project is that the more experience and familiarity we get out of this the better contributors we become. As a newcomer, I lacked and missed a lot of parts but seeing myself learn from my mistakes whether that me through others feedbacks or from my own I realized that becoming an active user and doing things right requires a lot of time, effort and contribution as well as the willingness to make mistakes and fix right away.