User talk:Xeimonanthos
| This user is a student editor in University_of_Florida/Languages_of_the_World_(Fall_2022) . |
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[edit]Hello, Xeimonanthos, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.
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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 04:52, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
Reflective Essay on Zuwara Berber Contributions
[edit]What I learned about Wikipedia during the article evaluation is that, while the information for improving articles is available, ensuring that the content is qualitative and putting it together takes a lot of time. The article I selected had few significant pieces of information, so there wasn’t much to critique. Thus, I thought I had a lot of information I could add, although I soon found that I was restricted by the quality of the sources I could find.
I added several sections from scratch and made changes to the Lead section. This included sections for Number of Speakers, Writing System, Phonology, and Prosody. For the Phonology section, I created a table that classified the language’s consonants. Additionally, I added examples of translations from the language. Overall, my article has much more information that it did before, as it used to only have a Lead section.
Completing the peer reviews gave me a lot of insight into what I could do with my own article. It also reinforced the Wikipedia training, as I saw how others applied the lessons to their drafts. In other words, the peer reviews gave me a better understanding of how to follow the structure that Wikipedia lays out for prospective editors.
From contributing to Wikipedia, I learned that it is a behemoth of information. Large articles have tens or even hundreds of sources, and even a relatively small article like mine had five quality sources. Hence, there is a lot of information that must be consumed and written out while following certain guidelines, which can be difficult at times. However, the benefit is that plenty of meaningful information about a topic can be found in one place, which ultimately saves other people time and helps them expand their understanding of various topics. This assignment was unlike any I’ve done in the past, as the learning objective was not absolute and was instead based on my own experiences. I could pick from a list of unrelated languages and could make changes in the aspects I wanted, which granted me as an assignee a lot of freedom in this process that I do not usually have. As long as Wikipedia users continue to add information and the general public is exposed to it, the public’s understanding of languages can be improved. People do not necessarily seek out information, but by making it accessible those that do are much more likely to learn something new.
My contribution provided information on a language that is relatively unknown by the public. After all, little is known by the public even about the continent the language is spoken on, Africa. In addition to ignorance and a lack of interest by the public, I think a reason for this problem is a lack of accessible resources to learn more. Simply put, people don’t know about underrepresented topics in part because they are not addressed by researchers to a great extent. For instance, the article I selected and others on the list had very little information. It was rather challenging contributing to this subject area, whereas there is a plethora of information available for well-represented subject areas.
This Wikipedia assignment enabled me to recognize that sharing information can have varying degrees of difficulty, depending on the regulations in place. If Wikipedia allowed anyone to edit with minimal barriers, pages could be flooded with false information. The processes behind a site like Wikipedia add value to the writing, but they come at the cost of making the sharing of information more difficult. If I were to improve today’s information landscape, I would be sure to comment only on the matters I am truly knowledgeable about. It became clear through this assignment that people are responsible for what they share with others, so they must proceed with caution as irresponsibility can be dangerous. Xeimonanthos (talk) 03:51, 6 November 2022 (UTC)