Throughout my attempt to create my own Wikipedia post I struggled a lot. Even with all of the thorough instruction that I received in the directions for this assignment, I found that I came to road block after roadblock. When attempting to come up with an idea of what to create an article about, I had a really hard time coming up with an idea. Everything that I searched already existed. Then I decided to write about the school that I attended from kindergarten to 8th grade. At first, I thought that the help pages themselves were complicated and difficult to read. I personally dislike the format of Wikipedia and I had a really hard time figuring out how to use it. The criteria for the article was something that also was very difficult to follow all at once. First, the article that you create must be “notable” according to Wikipedia. This is something that I did not know was a part of the website because I was always under the impression that it was simple for anyone to add a page or edit an existing one. I think that whether or not an article is “notable” is a bit too subjective for anyone to say and I did not like that not all articles are good enough to go public on the site. I understand why this feature exists so that people do not have the power to create an article about any crazy thing that they can come up with, and at the same time, I think the difficulty of creating a page gives the ones that are currently in existence a bit more credibility.
When I sat down to write the article I felt very overwhelmed with the amount of things that I had to read and think about all at the same time. Wikipedia’s formatting for writing and sourcing is much different than any other website that I have used before. I never do well when I have to follow a bunch of different links in order to figure out directions. Because of this, all of the different steps confused me. The basic guidelines for the text were simple in that they did not allow or condone plagiarism.
After I was finished with writing my article I felt very defeated. The way that this website was so foreign to me that I gave up after nearly two and a half hours trying to figure it out. When I clicked “submit article” the page made me fill out one of those tests to confirm that I was not a robot. This feature surprised me but I thought its presence was important. That made me think about how easy it would be for bots to create and submit countless fake articles. I think that fake news and fake websites have created a huge problem in the social media world and they have damaged the reputation of sites like Wikipedia because of that.
Once my article was submitted, the page refreshed to show me that it was not submitted for review. After all the time I spent trying to figure it out, this showed me truly how hard it is to create a Wikipedia article. I think that what I could have done better was to work on sourcing my information because that is such a crucial piece of Wikipedia articles overall. Also, I think that I should have disclosed my slight conflict of interest on the article’s talk page. Although I felt as though my article was unbiased, someone might want to know if this topic impacted my life in any way.
Overall, it is clear that I had constant struggles throughout my experience in trying to create a Wikipedia article. I have always discredited Wikipedia articles completely because I assumed that anyone anywhere could easily make one. Although this is partially correct, I think that this is no easy task. I still believe that Wikipedia articles are not “reliable” sources, yet if done well I think that proper articles can lead you to some real reliable links in order to learn about the topic at hand.
Nicole Danigelis 