Editing Online Communities (UW COM481 Winter 2022) (section)

==== Assessment: Wikipedia Reflection Essay ====

In addition to finishing up your Wikipedia article, everybody should turn in a report reflecting on your experience contributing to Wikipedia in light of your experience and the course material and, most importantly, offering advice to the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedia Community on how to improve their community. I want you all to treat this as a dress rehearsal for your final projects.

Your report will be evaluated, first and foremost, on the degree to which it provides useful, informed, and actionable advice to the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation. It will also be evaluated on the degree to which you engage with the course material. See the [[User:Benjamin Mako Hill/Assessment | writing rubric]] for details on my expectations in terms of the content of the papers. A successful essay will do the following things:

# Provide detailed, concrete, and actionable advice to the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation. What should Wikipedia think about doing? What should they think about changing?
# Comment directly on your experience in Wikipedia. What did you do and what did you learn?
# Connect your experience in Wikipedia explicitly to the concepts in the course material we have covered. Justify your recommendations in terms of the theories and principles we've covered. Why should your recommendations be taken more seriously than just random advice from one new user?
# If possible, reflect on what parts of the theories or concepts we covered applied or didn't. You don't have to take everything taught in the course for granted. What would you change or add based on your experience? What is unique or different about Wikipedia?

I will give everybody in the course feedback on their assignment. The basic structure is shorter, but extremely similar, to what you will be doing in the final project. As a result, you can treat this as a "mid-term" and make adjustments based on feedback.

There's no minimum word count, but I'd suggest you take advantage of the space you're given. Generally speaking, you can say more, be more insightful, demonstrate more fluency (all the things we are assessing) if you use more space.

Your audience is Wikipiedians who may read your report. You don't need to define things to prove to us that you've done the reading. You should define terms if you think that an audience of Wikipedians (who have not taken the class) will be lost/confused otherwise. Use your judgement to make a compelling, well reasoned, and well supported argument.

The intro, body, conclusion format is pretty reliable and useful. But if you feel it's better or more useful to deviate from that as well, that's fine.

Make an argument for why, based on your experience in Wikipedia and what you've learned in the class, things could/should be better and how that might happen. "A description of your experience" is part of that but we're not asking for a trip report. It should be service of the argument and suggestions you are making.