My Reflection as a Wiki Author
Personal journey and development through learning how to write for digital media
I had heard about Wikipedia being an open encyclopedia, where anyone can edit the articles. I have a faint memory of a hilarious edit that was made on a Indian celebrity’s wiki page! At that time, I had decided that shall make funny edits too, and I shall add wrong information to Wikipedia just to win bets! However, I never made a single edit, and I never thought that I would be writing on Wikipedia ever.
I was introduced to writing for Wikipedia, in my Writing for Digital Media class. This class used the Wikipedia’s WikiEdu dashboard. WikiEdu consisted of various trainings and assignments, which lasts throughout eight weeks. These trainings not only focused on training, but it also focused on execution. That helped me grasp the skill of writing for Wikipedia easily.
In this blog, I will be going over few of those exercises that we did during the eight weeks.
Critiquing Articles
One of the assignments we did was the article evaluation. This article required us to find an article on Wikipedia. It suggested that the article should be related to student’s course or have Start or Stub quality with High or Mid importance on the WikiProject Importance table. For article evaluation, I chose the article; Gujarat Cricket Association. This article has a Stub rating with a Low importance. Therefore, it is a good choice to work on.
The Gujarat Cricket Association is this governing body that handles all the Cricket activities in the state of Gujarat, India. I chose this topic because I have lived in the state of Gujarat the majority of life, and Cricket is one of my favorite sport. The article was straight to the point and consisted of accurate information. The information did not come across as biased. I checked the sources, and the worked. The sources were reliable as well. Next I looked at the missing information. Information like the president’s name, list of Stadiums and grounds and participating tournaments were missing. Also, new sections like the “Affiliated District Association”, “GCA Tournaments”, “Teams” can to be added in the article.
Contributions
I chose the ICC — International Cricket Council article to edit. This article is of the Interest of three WikiProject: WikiProject Cricket (Rated Start-class, Top-importance), WikiProject Organization (Rated Start-class, High-importance) and (Rated Start-class, Top-importance). This factor compelled me to work on it. First I read it’s talk page, there I found out that this article was once a Top-rated article. In the talk page I found out that the “History” section of the Wikipedia page had information missing. Much of its history and timeline was not on the Wikipedia article. I created three sub-section under the “History” section and added all the information about the history of ICC.
Next, I corrected the countless grammar errors and misinformation; like the number of members, types of membership and much more. Finally I added the “Integrity” Section which describes the valuable information for the Anti-Racism, Anti-Doping and Anti-Corruption units of the ICC. I changed and added information in the section like: Members, Location and Rules and Regulations.
Peer Review
I did not get any peer review on my Wikipedia edits, however I did get peer review on my previous blog where I have discussed the visual editing process of Wikipedia. My class mate, Heather, recommended a few grammatical correction, she made sure that I was following the instructor’s guidelines and I had enough sources to support my information. Also my instructor, Gerald Lucas posted review for my blog. He suggested the use of better languages and sources. Also, he suggested that I check my the use of capitalization and the use of the words like “you” and “your”.
On the other hand, I peer reviewed two Wikipedia articles; Data Storage & Thanos. My classmates had their drafts ready on their sandboxes. I went to their draft and corrected their many grammatical mistakes, helped them use better sentences and gave them suggestions to add more references at certain places.
