W10 make up class) What did I learn while editing Wikipedia? / Dayoung Ryu 류다영

Editing hard, finding interesting point

The task of editing Wikipedia was interesting: in fact, editing Wikipedia included finding out which areas I wanted to edit and which areas I was interested in. As we thought, this process was not easy, and one more difficult thing was that I knew nothing about Wikipedia’s editing.

For me, Wikipedia was an encyclopedia that many people could edit. I never have edited something in Wikipedia, even though I could participate in Wikipedia. Because I did not want to edit anything, and I did not have time to edit it. So, I was happy because I could edit Wikipedia’s articles through this course. I thought this was a single-stone-two-birds (catch two birds with a stone) until there were so many Wikipedia tasks.

Honestly, many students may have thought the same thing as me: editing Wikipedia is fun, but it takes a lot of time to edit. It took me more than twenty minutes to find some reliable sources, read the references, and pick out some parts what I needed to edit an article, and then rephrase it in my language.
Wouldn’t it take more time to write a normal report with references in other classes? No, it would not. Every week I spent more than an hour in Wikipedia and writing on blogs for assignments.

What I have gained from this process is that “editing is painful.” It is not easy to write with my editing being rolled back or with advice that the ‘source is unreliable.’ However, why would I continue to edit? It is because of Wikipedia culture.

Many people spend time editing Wikipedia. I have not seen yet, but in Wikipedia, there are also acts of purposely misediting. (I call this action is trolling,) but there are people who fix these misedited articles - in fact, there seem to be more men who fix articles than people who troll. As a result, people who are not interested in Wikipedia do not even know what happened in Wikipedia. They still find information in Wikipedia, but they do not know the existence of trolling. This is my favorite point in Wikipedia.

In some large communities, it is common to find criticizing the cause if something goes wrong, but in Wikipedia, no one gives a penalty or punishing of someone make wrong edits. But they talk about what is right through discussion page, and they block users for malicious misediting. This system, or culture, is not perfect. However, with the help of technology, a very moderate culture was settled into Wikipedia. I like this point.