User:Katie Zack/Reflection

Wikipedia Reflection

Anxiety

I have never been more afraid of an online community than I am of Wikipedians.

This does not mean that Wikipedians are trying to be scary. I am ninety-percent sure that they are not. This means that I, myself, have a great fear of failure, as well as online interactions. I once commented on a Bon Iver YouTube video six years ago and I am still haunted to this day from the reply thread. I have socialized greatly on other platforms like Twitter and Instagram, but it never seemed as high-risk as interacting with a Wikipedian. These hypothetical interactions include edits of others' pages. I am even anxious about responding to edits of my own pages. What it mainly comes down to is the fear of sounding uninformed, and an online record to prove it. Who am I to know anything about anything? And then to argue that I do? I experienced anxiety that preceded an imposter syndrome I was not even successful enough to justify having. I felt like an imposter just by existing on this site as anyone here to do something other than read experienced Wikipedians' articles. I finally became more comfortable after a few tries and Wikipedia tasks. I still have neither the confidence nor desire to dive into editing a highly-contested or monitored article, due to the fact that I do not want to make myself vulnerable to being yelled at for messing up someone else's work.

Joining Wikipedia

I am being graded on this.

I did not experience a natural desire to join Wikipedia like many others, but I was assigned it my first day of this semester. The fact that my professor is an extremely experienced Wikipedian is one of the only things that allowed me to find any success operating on here. None of my classmates had joined Wikipedia before this class, either, so we were all at the same level of inexperience. The first design claim of Kraut and Resnik states that active recruiting gives the site access to more potential members than using a passive laissez-faire strategy. I am not sure that as many of my classmates would have contributed to Wikipedia if Professor Reagle had mentioned we "could join if we wanted" with no other incentive. Being mentored is a very helpful and effective experience, but having other people who were new as well helped me learn and made me more comfortable. Knowing that someone else is going through what you are as a newbie lets you forgive yourself for more mistakes. My confidence grew once I joined and went through the tutorial. Kraut and Resnick also claim that providing newcomers with a clear idea of what their experience on the site will be "increases the fit' of the new member with that community. The tutorial as well as our in-class discussions helped to provide that picture for me and gave me an idea of what to expect.

Accessibility

Coding is intimidating.

My computer science friends laughed at me when I told them I was nervous about coding. "It's just HTML." I have coded before in a high school class, but I have never coded for a website that already exists with users. I was surprised that coding was not the thing that confused me the most on this site. Hidden pages confuse me the most about Wikipedia. How could it be that I have been going to this site for as long as I have had internet access and yet I didn't know a single thing about being a user? Talk pages and page histories, as well as user pages and WikiLove were all unheard of to me. I didn't even know there was such a thing as the "article of the day" on the front page. I had only ever used Wikipedia directly following a Google search. I can't think of another site that has such different public and private sides to it. It was strange to me that I could not simply "like" someone's user page or article. WikiLove involves coding as well as even just signing your name. I can't imagine what Facebook or Twitter would be like if people had to specifically remember to write their names on their posts. The amount of actions users can take on Wikipedia seems infinite and complex to a new user like myself, and I'm not sure I'd ever be able to fully understand each thing. Because it take s a while to figure out how to navigate the site and what kind of pages contain what kind of content, it makes Design Claim 18 more difficult to achieve. It claims that newcomers are more likely to stay and contribute if the have friendly interactions with pre-existing members. It took me a long time to figure out how to message another user, so I can only imagine what that is like for people who do not have classmates and a professor guiding them.

Stealing and Cheating

My two closest allies while creating my article were Copy and Paste. This is my favorite aspect of Wikipedia. You can steal pretty much anything in terms of coding. I appreciate this the most because it saves time and creates recognizable templates. I used this strategy for creating my tables and info box. I was able to take the table code from Music on The O.C. and the info box from the show's main page You're the Worst. This is a helpful feature and one that I have not seen on other online social media platforms. I often forget that Wikipedia is collaborative. Most content creators that I know would want full credit and their name on every piece of complex coding template the created. Wikipedia instead allows others to build off of what is already there, which makes the process of creating a much less lonely experience.

The other part of me not entirely knowing what I was doing while coding is that I accidentally overrode someone's coding on my article without realizing until I hit "Save changes." I deleted the flags that had been put on my article. I still feel guilty about this, but I also feel that it would be strange to re-flag my own article. I am not sure if this is against the rules of Wikipedia, but I would assume that it is frowned upon at the least. It will be interesting to see if there is any sort of moderation for deleting your own flags. I would understand if they punished me after doing so. I have poked the Wiki bear. I will wait to see if it wakes up.

Creating an Article

Television is my main interest and career goal. This is why I chose to contribute to a television show. I often find myself searching for songs that I hear play in TV shows, so I figured that I must not have been the only one. I found hundreds of people in different chatrooms around the internet who were searching for specific song titles and artists from You're the Worst and I wanted to be the person who streamlined that search. I have never before felt as though I contributed something to the internet as a whole. Wikipedia gave me that feeling. I understand why some people can become addicted to editing. Wikipedia is often the first search result for Google, and Google is, by far, the most used search engine on the internet. The internet is the most-used source for knowledge in the country, if not the world. The feeling of having your own article be the most influential link on the internet for that topic is almost dizzying. The coding was not unbearable while creating the article. What I found myself enjoying was seeing the final product after the coding. This assignment opened my eyes to a whole new means of creation. I credit the Sandbox feature for this freedom in experimenting because it still makes trial coding look like a real article. Design claim 25 from Kraut and Resnick says that sandboxes speed up the learning process and reduce harm that newcomers can cause to the community. This helped me to learn in a safe space where I did not have to worry about the anxiety I mentioned above.

Being Edited

I was flagged for not meeting the notability guidelines as well and using sources that are too close to the subject. That was a startling aspect of being a newcomer on the site. I have never been a part of another site where I was immediately and visibly stamped with disapproval for everyone to see. There is a form of public shaming that occurs but it also appears as a challenge. I felt challenged to strategize my way around fixing these issues. I added more links to internal and external articles in an attempt to satisfy the site requirements. I refrained from engaging in any arguments, as I was in no way surprised that my first article I ever created had some issues. I was surprised that I was only given these minor flags instead of numerous major ones. I credit this with having read the fucking manual on what makes a perfect article. The site made contributing easy by providing a clear list of guidelines.

Conclusion

Well, here we are.

I'm excited by the fact that I have contributed something to Wikipedia. I can't say that it ever crossed my mind to do in a non-joking way. The experience was interesting in that it let me see behind the curtains of Wikipedia. I started with much apprehension and it took a long time to get comfortable with the platform. I feel less afraid of coding now, and more aware of how to takeaway information from Wikipedia articles. I now know to check the talk page on an article to see if there are any disagreements about how it is written, and I know to check for flags. I appreciate that there is such a strong emphasis on having credible references. I wish I head learned that any time before my final semester, but maybe it will come up for me again in the future. I am very glad I had the support of a professor and class while trying Wikipedia. I probably would have quit early on due to sheer confusion. I can't say that I will be contributing any more articles to the site, although I may keep tabs on Music on You're The Worst. I hope that Wikipedians continue to update and improve it.