This experience taught me the challenges and benefits of collaborative web writing. It was easy for us to split up the different sections of the Wiki page that we had to write, but we were able to all work at different times. This allowed me to do my part of the work when I had time and I didn’t have to meet up with my partners to do the assignment. First, we started by working in a google document, but we each had to upload our own writing for credit.
One night, Ava and I decided to start uploading our work to the actual Wikipedia page so we could get a feel for what it would look like. We didn’t want the website to block us from both editing the site at the same time so we too turns uploading paragraphs and lists.
Next, we began working on the metadata in order to start organizing and structuring the page for the web, something that isn’t done in academic writing. I have used WordPress for a club before so I understood the idea of the headers and bullet points.
By the end of the night, the page looked really good after we were able to add all of our work and the metadata to arrange everything. It was nice to have other partners who could also work on the page and the metadata. I was struggling to figure out how to properly make an Infobox so I was able to ask my partners if they could take a look at it too.
One challenge that we had from writing for the web was having too many lists within our article. We want to get a good article award but one thing Wikipedia doesn’t classify as a good article is one with too many lists. I helped work on the history sections which gave us more paragraph writing which helped the validity of our article. I had to keep in mind that Wikipedia doesn’t allow for biased work so as I was writing and editing my peers’ work, it was important to note the voice behind the writing.
Overall, I feel good about the work I put into this article and I think my group pulled it together to create a good piece to submit to Wikipedia. I definitely learned more about how to write for a virtual and vast audience, something that I haven’t been able to really work on in school yet.