Final reflection
As was mentioned in the process description section, if the requested articles section was discovered earlier, it would have been possible to add more complex content that would have added to the overall value of Wikipedia. However, the addition of more information on the university is a proud first contribution for a new wikipedian. The format used is on par with the format used by other universities, and the info-box also provides more direct information to other users. There is still quite a lot more information that can be added to offer more value to other users, however the improvement contains the most basic and valuable information pertaining the subject. The second article contribution was basically a more compressed summary of the most important information regarding the website of Ezmo and will definitely be valuable to certain users. It also adds a certain finesse to the article which was previously lacking. Finally, the third article unfortunately added no value to the community and in fact only turned out to be a time consuming process for a particular administrator.
All in all, it is my opinion that contributing information to an online community is a worthwhile experience and helps to get more users actively involved.
Thursday, 18 October 2007
Assignment 2: Online communities:Wiki-Away - Part II
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.
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.
Tuesday, 16 October 2007
Assignment 2: Online communities:Wiki-Away - Part I
Description of the context: Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project and Wikipedia's articles provide links within the articles to guide the user to related pages with additional and explanatory information.
There are currently approximately 2 million articles in English and every day thousands of visitors from around the world edit and create new articles to increase the knowledge base held by this encyclopedia. Most articles can be edited by anyone, with the exception of a select few, simply by clicking the edit this page link. This is in fact one of the strong points of Wikipedia, however it is also the biggest downfall of the encyclopedia. Users with a deep knowledge base on a particular subject can easily contribute information on their subject with ease, but this gives also rise to vandalism and wrong information. Fortunately, the software on which Wikipedia is powered by (mediaWiki) easily allows the rollback of information to previous articles.
With thanks to the large contributing community of Wikipedia, there is also no need to worry about accidentally damaging Wikipedia when adding or improving articles, as other editors are always around to advise or correct obvious errors. There are also several administrators that constantly ensure the behavior of the contributors conforms to the policies and guidelines.
Wikipedia is broadly considered as reliable as Encyclopedia Britannica with similar error rates on major and minor omissions and errors within the articles. Thanks to the requirements of academic citations of sources allows Wikipedia to be a good starting point for research. However, due to the changing nature of wiki’s together with the possible of huge omissions and uncorrected vandalism, it is difficult to hold up against scrutiny when using Wikipedia as the main source of any research paper.
Most articles in Wikipedia start as stubs, but can become featured articles after many contributions. When contributing to Wikipedia, it is important to keep the five pillars of Wikipedia in mind. These five principles are:
Furthermore, the key policies and guidelines of Wikipedia are
Lastly, for new contributors there are a series of tutorials available that quickly and efficiently explain how to edit articles. As was mentioned previously, creating an account is not a requirement, however it is easy to create an account and allows you to build up a reputation for contributing worthwhile content.
Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project and Wikipedia's articles provide links within the articles to guide the user to related pages with additional and explanatory information.
There are currently approximately 2 million articles in English and every day thousands of visitors from around the world edit and create new articles to increase the knowledge base held by this encyclopedia. Most articles can be edited by anyone, with the exception of a select few, simply by clicking the edit this page link. This is in fact one of the strong points of Wikipedia, however it is also the biggest downfall of the encyclopedia. Users with a deep knowledge base on a particular subject can easily contribute information on their subject with ease, but this gives also rise to vandalism and wrong information. Fortunately, the software on which Wikipedia is powered by (mediaWiki) easily allows the rollback of information to previous articles.
With thanks to the large contributing community of Wikipedia, there is also no need to worry about accidentally damaging Wikipedia when adding or improving articles, as other editors are always around to advise or correct obvious errors. There are also several administrators that constantly ensure the behavior of the contributors conforms to the policies and guidelines.
Wikipedia is broadly considered as reliable as Encyclopedia Britannica with similar error rates on major and minor omissions and errors within the articles. Thanks to the requirements of academic citations of sources allows Wikipedia to be a good starting point for research. However, due to the changing nature of wiki’s together with the possible of huge omissions and uncorrected vandalism, it is difficult to hold up against scrutiny when using Wikipedia as the main source of any research paper.
Most articles in Wikipedia start as stubs, but can become featured articles after many contributions. When contributing to Wikipedia, it is important to keep the five pillars of Wikipedia in mind. These five principles are:
- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia
- Wikipedia is free content
- Wikipedia works by building consensus
- Wikipedia has a code of conduct
- Wikipedia does not have firm rules, apart from these five pillars
Furthermore, the key policies and guidelines of Wikipedia are
- Wikipedia works by building consensus
- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia
- Respect other contributors
- Respect copyrights
- Avoid bias
- Include only verifiable information
Lastly, for new contributors there are a series of tutorials available that quickly and efficiently explain how to edit articles. As was mentioned previously, creating an account is not a requirement, however it is easy to create an account and allows you to build up a reputation for contributing worthwhile content.
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