From my personal experience with the Wikipedia project up to this point, I am becoming more familiar with the website’s functions from an editor’s perspective as time goes on, but there are still parts of Wikipedia that I want to explore more, especially the sandbox. My group members and I have been working really well together and we were able to come up with a solid plan to follow as we try to improve the article “Commercialization of the Internet.” I am personally happy that this is a group project because this project in general is definitely not easy and has multiple challenges that can be resolved better when working with other people in my opinion. Since our article does not have a lot of information and needs to be expanded on, my group and I have to not only focus on adding our own information, but also continuing the ideas of the people who worked on this article before us, which can be tricky if we have trouble finding a source that was used but not cited. We also realized that the article has organizational issues and we are going to be responsible for adjusting the time periods of each section as well as including subtopics within each section to make the information more digestible for the reader. 

 

Amidst all of the chaos which comes from working on an underdeveloped Wikipedia article, I think my group has been doing a great job in making the process more organized and as of right now, we have a nice work rhythm going where we try to find as many sources as we can and share them with one another. As far as my individual contributions go, I have helped with finding sources and adding a new subsection to the article, but individual contributions among the group will get more specific once we feel that we have enough information on several time periods that can be split up among everyone in the group. The main thing that worries me about the project is that I want to make sure that the article does not have many flaws by the end of the semester because knowing that the work we do will be seen by anyone in the world who is interested in the commercialization of the internet adds some pressure to make the article as “perfect” as possible. 

 

In regards to how this project will impact me as a writer, I believe that I will have a new perspective once my group and I finish expanding on the article. In my writing experiences, I have been used to formal academic papers and creative writing assignments for my English classes or just for fun, but writing a Wikipedia article feels extremely different because there is no room for my own analysis or ideas, and it requires me to only include information that I find in sources. It feels like I am using the research aspect of research projects to write about something that expands way past my grades and schoolwork. This Wikipedia project is giving me an opportunity to write for the public and to give them information that is not as widespread at the moment, which is exciting since one of my goals in life is to write a novel for many people to read, not only my teachers and classmates. Overall, this project has been both challenging and fun and I am confident that my group will make great contributions to the “Commercialization of the Internet” article.