As a long-time user of Wikipedia as a resource, I have a greater appreciation for the communities and users who have spent countless hours creating articles. This was my first time editing a wiki page and I don’t think I would again.
While the interface for editing isn’t too difficult to navigate it isn’t the most user-friendly in comparison to WordPress, Tumblr or any other online community forum. While the guidelines for edits, talk page and citations were easy to understand it was easier said than done. I honestly found it quite frustrating working on the page I chose. I selected the Daily Breeze, a local southern California newspaper. I thought this was an appropriate choice as this class is media literacy and my respect for journalism has increased over the years as a mass communications student.
navigating the Talk page was difficult. it’s not cut and dry when searching of where exactly to add a comment or what goes where. this alone lead to some trepidation to continue. It looked like something already developed and absent of anything to do. To me, it looked like a guide for resources of topic or subject of the article itself.
secondly, I had a hard time finding what would be poignet to include in the article. when using the search engine many articles had a class ranking of how developed it was. For me trying to expand neutral information to any article was hard to manage. More often than not on even the most smaller articles they were expanded to where I felt it was complete. While adding a new fact about something might have been interesting I didn’t feel it improved the article as a whole. I was able to include new information but I think this process would have been easier if this was a new article. Building upon something, in my opinion, is much more difficult.
While this is my first time on Wikipedia as an editor I don’t think this is something I would return to. Each step just felt like a mission or a daunting task. However, this experience has opened my eyes to those building wiki pages. Especially upon learning female editors are a small number of the community and some like Emily Temple-Wood who received harassment for her work. While I had difficulty as a complete novice I hope that beyond the initial tutorials and sandbox there are more user-friendly guides for those to help build, correct and review pages.
