Process description:
Unfortunately diarizing has never been a good characteristic of mine, and I find it difficult to see the significance of small disconnected sections. I will therefore attempt to give an overview of the user experience in contributing to an online community, and discuss the separate aspects involved.
During the duration of this assignment I contributed to three articles within Wikipedia. Firstly, I would like to mention that finding a suitable subject on which to contribute to Wikipedia seems difficult. Contributing a new article on something worthwhile initially appears quite difficult. I later realized that there is an entire page devoted to requested articles. This would be the obvious place to look for something interesting on which you already have information about. Unfortunately I discovered this a little too late, and ended up struggling to find something on which to contribute.
That said, the three articles that I contributed to were:
The first article that I contributed to was on the university where I am currently studying at. I was shocked when I first realized that there was only a short paragraph on the university as well contact details. This provided the opportunity to instead of struggling on creating an entire new article, to just add to an existing article. As was mentioned in the context post there are several tutorials on editing articles. However, a different philosophy exists where the best way to learn something new is to play with it until it breaks. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, it is not that easy to “break” an article on Wikipedia.
While editing an article there is sandbox in which you can experiment, play, test and preview the article before you save any changes. There is also a capability to view the history of a page and see what was added during each edit. Furthermore, thanks to the many contributors, a spelling or grammar error usually only has a short lifespan before it is corrected. The sandbox was very useful when I tried to add an information box in the top right hand corner. It initially seems a lot more complicated, but soon it was discovered that there are several templates available to assist in creating advanced pages. Another big advantage is that due to the vast availability of content on Wikipedia it is easy to see how to implement something with the aid of an example. For an example another university wiki which had an info-box was opened and edited which lead to the discovery of the readily available templates.
The second big discovery was made during the search on how to create a contents section for an article. Within the help section there exist a “Cheatsheet”, which is very helpful in the formatting of an article. This contains text shortcuts from how to italicize or bold specified text to creating links and also to apply different headings for sections. Furthermore, when more than four headings are used within an article, a content section is automatically created. The content section therefore proved to be a lot easier to create than originally anticipated. As Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, it is necessary to add references to the pages. When the correct “tags” are used to create references, an organized reference section is automatically added at the end of the article. This is of great assistance in keeping the article organized.
The last difficulty associated with the first article arose with the addition of the university logo. This originally proved to be a confusing process, but a quick search within the encyclopedia quickly revealed an article which assists with this. An image is then basically treated as a new article and to display the image within the article uses similar tags as when you link to another internal article. This article was left for a day, and when I next logged on to Wikipedia a notice was displayed that there is a new message for me. This message was basically concerning the image that I uploaded. When adding content to Wikipedia it is important to adhere to copyright laws, and in this case, it was necessary to provide information on why the logo could be used under the fair use clause which allows the use of this image. This is necessary as other articles can also link to the image and display the image and might lead to serious copyright issues. In the case that no information was provided on the image page, the image would be deleted within a week to protect Wikipedia. This notice were created by a bot, and also lead to the realization that several other bots constantly run on the wiki and prevents users from making unnecessary mistakes.
Unfortunately, the second article that was contributed to was not nearly as big a contribution, but was mainly an info-box. As was mentioned within the previous section, there are several templates available that allows for the quick creation of these info-boxes. This article was mainly chosen as the name appeared on a technology review webpage. It was anticipated that other users might also contribute to this article during the time assignment time, but unfortunately that has not occurred.
The third article that was added was purely used as an experiment. Another name that appeared on a technology review list was used to create the article. There was in fact very little information added at the beginning, also with the hope that other users might contribute and that the process might be observed. The name Social.fm was basically only a name change from Mercora to Social.fm. Unfortunately, before any other users were capable of contributing to it, someone tagged it to be speedily deleted. It turns out that there are certain criteria which allow a page to be tagged for speedy deletion. Another message was sent to my talk page on Wikipedia which warned of tag. It also provides instruction on what to do before it is deleted to notify administrators to wait a little while longer before deleting it. Instructions on how to proceed in the case that the article was already deleted is also provided within this particular message. Even though this was not the response that was expected, it still provided valuable information on the functioning of Wikipedia.
Lastly, to provide a little more information on the process, each article allows users to add watch tags. When a page has been tagged to be watched, it keeps users up to date on any changes that occur on those articles from the date it was tagged. When a user is logged in there is a small link “my watchlist” in the top right corner of Wikipedia which displays list wise what changes occurred to the separate articles. The last interesting observation was the speed at which certain information is updated. Within the search to update something useful to the community, information regarding the availability of the IPhone in France was investigated. Within an hour of the release of the article on the internet the respective article was already updated with the corresponding information. This only provided confirmation of active community that contributes to Wikipedia.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment