Wikipedia Reflection

After being a partial writer to this Wikipedia project I have learned that it is difficult to change the style of your writing. It’s difficult to write in the format of Wikipedia. You have to remain unbiased and not add in any claims of your own. When stating claims, you must give credit to those who deserve it. Also, when working in a space like Wikipedia, you have to be prepared for changes and rejections because it is a website with open access to edit.

When writing an article for Wikipedia, there are many aspects to look at. When writing for Wikipedia, there are a lot of hidden steps that the average person may not consider. When writing in Wikipedia, it’s imperative to write through levels of lower states. The article needs to be fact based. You cannot show any bias toward the subject.

One aspect that I found difficult to do was write in the format of the average audience. Word choice is a big part of that, because although using a word like “discourse” or “sphere” seems average to a student in an advanced writing and editing class, it doesn’t appear that way to the average Wikipedia viewer. But it is also important not to “dumb down” the writing as well. It takes a lot of thought and revision to make a Wikipedia article what it is.

Writing a Wikipedia article is difficult enough, but when adding in the idea of a group project, on top of an entire class piece, think about the complications one can encounter. With writing different parts, the issues we would encounter are the clarity of the piece, having repeated subjects along with having one solid tone of the article. After completion of the actual material in the article, we divided into groups to bring the entire article together. I think that as a whole class, we did a great job meeting the purpose of the article and getting it ready for production.

When doing revisions of the article, I focused a lot on the article “Editing out Obscenity.” It helped guide me in the right direction of how a article should look and when to make changes when necessary. I also had the responsibility of checking the spelling of the article, therefore I used WWC to check for commonly misspelled words and I had to check multiple sources to make sure that what we were using was accurate.

Overall, the assignment went well and it taught me to write in a different format and sphere. I expanded my style of writing and working with others and learned to write in the way that the average reader would understand, without making myself or the class sound uneducated.