This semester one of the activities was to publish an article in Wikipedia. At first, our group didn’t know if to create a new article or to translate an article done before to basque. After thinking for some days, we decided that we will translate a english article into basque, but the next deal was to choose which article to translate. We think about bach, Grace Codington, Anna Wintour and so on, but finally we everyone agree on writing about Nora Roberts, an American writer, who has had lot of succes as a romantic writer all over the world.

We took a long time translating the article because it was quite long, but at the same time I think that it was a good chance to improve our skills on translation, mainly because it is something that we are going to be expected to do when we finish our degree. Apart from this, we were able to know more about Nora Roberts, how her life is, all her succes and how she get to get the fame that she has nowadays.

Editing the article in Wikipedia was a nice experience, we almost know how to do it, becuase we learned it editing our WCPlan, the exercices and so on, but, apart from that, we had the oportunity to learn new things, as for example how to categorize the article, how to create an “infobox”…

Since we were editing our article we could realize the human cooperation that this web site has. We were trying to do our infobox, but we could not edit it, and when the next day we were ready to follow editing it, we realize that a Wikipedia member did it for us, and apart from that, he improved our article. It was a big surprise for the group, so we investigated about this person, and we saw that he everyday helped people editing his articles, improving them, and even aswering some doubts about how to edit that the users asked him. We are so thankful, because thanks to him, our article is better than we think it was going to be. We can say that he is going to be the one who improved our mark.

The Community of Wikipedia

It’s useful to try to quantify community, while at the same time being a lot like sorting drops in the ocean. The essence of community is encoded in the word itself: come-ye-into-unity. At the essential level, community occurs anytime two or more people come into harmony (not necessarily agreement) around any subject. Community arises as a function of interest and participation. At some point beyond two participants, a community is actually a community of communities.

In a larger sense, the Wikipedia community includes all casual and/or anonymous editors, ideological supporters, current readers and even potential readers of all the language versions of Wikipedia-the-encyclopedia.

This covers a majority of the Earth’s human population, but it’s probably important to remember every once in a while that very, very many people have a stake in the content of the encyclopedia and the direction of the project.

A narrower definition of the Wikipedia community — for lack of a better word, let’s call it the Wikipedia contributor community — is that group of contributors who create an identity (either a user account, or a frequently-used anonymous IP), and who communicate with other contributors.

It’s debatable whether there are many Wikipedia communities, based on the different languages, or just one. Many of the members of the non-English communities participate in English Wikipedia as well. Technical issues are coordinated between all the Wikipedias, too.

References

• Members of Wikipedia (last modified on 27 April 2012 at 08:50). “Mary Ellen Snodgrass”. Retrieved 2012.05.07 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ellen_Snodgrass
• Members of Wikipedia (last modified 23 December 2011, at 23:10). “The Wikipedia Community”. Retrieved 2012.05.07 from: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Community
  

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