Criterion E: Evaluation

This was a very short project, but as usual we followed the design cycle. At the beginning of the unit we decided on three design specifications for our unit:

1. Every sentence must have a citation.
2. The text must be grammatically correct.
3. One week after our upload, there should be no need for anyone to edit our text.

We looked through our article and checked that every sentence had a citation for a valid source, which was the case. As for the grammar of the text, we asked Kyu and Sonya to look through the section we edited and none of them found any grammatical errors. We can't check our last section as one week as not passed yet, but so far no changes have been made and since none of the people we asked found any edits, it is likely there is no need for changes. Wikipedia is mainly used by students or people who don't know much about the subject, so the fact people who didn't know about the Gaia hypothesis at all were able to understand what we wrote is an indicator our project was adapted to its audience.


Criterion A
Suugii and me split up the six questions of investigation and each set out to research three. She was sick on the day we were supposed to do this, though, so we decided to reschedule and separately answer all six questions. Looking up how Wikipedia worked was interesting and I spent a lot on this - the organization of it all was quite impressive. The problem was that I had a lot of time to work on my three initial questions and quickly rushed through the other three that I wasn't planning to answer. I think my understanding of Wikipedia could have been better if I had spent more time on it. This didn't really affect the rest of our work on this project, but I think it might have had an effect on my general perspective of wikis.

Since she was one class behind me, Suugii was still completing her original six questions while I started work on the the next part of investigation, designing a method to find inaccuracies. While answering the questions, I had learned about something called template messages. Anyone browsing Wikipedia can add little indicators to sections, such as "This section does not cite any sources." This seemed just the perfect solution for finding inaccuracies, so that's what I suggested we use. I think it was indeed a good idea but we didn't really take into account the massive size of Wikipedia.

We thought we'd just look at one sub-section of the site, go through all the pages, find one with template messages and edit it. Except that a sub-section was about...5000 pages. We finally ended up browsing a sub-sub-sub section, which had a more reasonable amount of 50 articles. Our technique for finding inaccuracies was also problematic in that we were really looking for inaccuracies others had already spotted. How do people find the pages to put template messages on in the first place? We also ended up editing a page that was somewhat interesting, but not something which we would be considered experts in. That gave us much more work than planned, and maybe our project was a little over-ambitious. Most groups simply changed one fact, while we went for a whole section which turned to be full of subjective errors, harder to verify than a number. It might have been a better idea to think more about our method for finding inaccuracies, as this really affected the rest of our project.

Criterion B
Once we had researched our topic in some detail, it was time to actually edit the page itself. Many of the words in that section of the article seemed to be somewhat biased, so giving the article a more neutral tone was the first thing that I did. I then changed some of the numbers, words, and overall I think I came up with a good Wikipedia edit. However, I think I sometimes thought too much about grammar and the exactitude of my statements and neglected the actual writing style. My edits made the text somewhat dull to read - very short sentences, only containing true facts presented in a neutral manner, but still not very interesting. Finding a balance between the cold hard facts and the flow, the creative side of writing, is something I often have trouble with. For this project, I leaned too much towards facts and thinking a little bit about the actual reading value of what I wrote would have improved our edits.

Criterion D
Creation was an incredibly short part of this project. It was basically just about putting our work on Wikipedia, and editing it to follow the general layout of the website. Suugii and me didn't know much about how to use wiki code, but it wasn't very hard to get. I wish that we had spent a little more time learning about it, though, so maybe we could have included more advanced formatting such as pictures, italics, links outside of Wikipedia...but then, we were only editing a small section of a page. Something we did that was good in my opinion was writing about the edits we had made in detail, so that other contributors to the page know what's going on. Not much to say on this part of the project, except that it went pretty well.

Overall
This was a small unit but it got us to grips with Wikipedia in general. I would say that in general, our project was a little over-ambitious - changing just one sentence would've been fine, and would've given us more time to learn about Wikipedia itself instead of doing research on an obscure scientific theory. On the other hand, I did learn a lot from the research itself, which showed me that Wikipedia's uses go beyond compiling information for everyone to learn: those who edit the articles are also learning a lot themselves. This encyclopedia is the kind that is useful to the entire society, as both contributors and users (who are very often the same person) can gain general knowledge from it.
As for my own part in the project, I think I did pretty well but didn't do enough teamwork. Because of one missed class at the beginning of the unit, Suugii was constantly just a little behind me and I didn't feel like waiting a class for us two to be at the same level. Instead, I ended up doing a lot of work individually when it would've been more interesting to work on it as a pair. Waiting just one class would've made a large difference, and that's something I need to think about in case this situation ever presents itself to me again.