Christy R.’s blog

Self Evaluation of Wikiality Group Project

 I. Against our own design specifications: The first step of my design specification was to look for mistakes and outdated information and then correct them, or update them. The second stage was to research information from at least two (reliable) sources. This we did – we found an outdated article on Wikipedia about ISU and we used both the school’s official website and had personal interviews with some of the very knowledgeable staff of the school and gathered information. That’s two ticks right there. =)

My last step was to review the information from accuracy of information to grammar. This we did altogether – and all by ourselves too. Three/three checks. ^^

II. On each stage of the project:

A – Investigation – everyone in our group described the project and answered questions on it, and everyone described a method in finding inaccuracies on wikipedia. We found a wikipedia article on the school and that was our proof that our method worked! All of these things are also posted on our blog, 6/6 :))

B – Design – In our group we may not’ve achieved as much teamwork as there could’ve been, but we did make the corrections on the article, first in writing, then on the pc, and then posted it onto our blog. We also corrected it all using the strikethrough feature. We also found accurate sources because we used sources that came from our school itself, and our article was on ISU. 6/6

C – Create – We all had our responsibility agreements in (since we were able to go on wikipedia with the ISU username + password) and we had Mrs. Wilson to check our corrections together with the citations before that, on paper. We’ve spent time researching and we’ve spent time correcting the article as well as tried to keep our grammar as professional as possible, so hopefully not everything will get deleted from Wikipedia! 6/6

III.Whether or not our edits had been changed, why? I used the ‘history’ tab on the article to look for any changes they(other users) may’ve possibly made. Yes, some of our edits had been changed/deleted. Our citations edit had been removed and one spelling mistake (MINI!) was changed too.

Our personal interview citations were taken off because it was an original source; we had to have independent published sources. Thanks to the user that explained this to us when he/she took it off.

The spelling mistake we made was writing ’semsester’ instead of semester. This got corrected by another user too. Pretty amazing.

As a conclusion, I think wikipedia is more accurate than most people think, but this is not the same as to say it is fully accurate. There are always people patrolling and checking, and changing edits. I was shocked to find that another user actually found a spelling mistake; especially when it was a mistake of only 2 letters needing to be switched around. It shows how much detail (most of) the community pays attention to. In this case it is most probably true that the users had no clue what the article was about; but many of them do know proper grammar. This is efficient because one person could come along with the right information but the wrong grammar. Another person could change this grammar and there you have it; a reliable source. If I were to rate the community which Wikipedia is built up on, it would be an 8/10, for the knowledgeable users that are often actually volunteering; not employed/forced to work.

Some changes we could do to have better use of our time and be more efficient next time: Our main weakness was not working together as a team all at once; but some people doing this and others doing that. Yet we only had only 3 people, not a team of 50. We should’ve listened to each other more closely and recommended jobs for one another, but we were basically all crowled up around the PC with someone listening to music, another socialising, and only 1 person working at once. We needed a person to take over and get in charge, but we didn’t really do that. Maybe that’s why we were doing different things; we didn’t have a person that would go, you do this, you do that, even though we’re in 10th grade. Since we were all assigned only 1 computer, we did quite a bad job in teamwork on it. Also, most of the time it was usually the same person typing and basically doing the work; Jemima. We didn’t really know what to do so we wandered off. This shouldn’t have happened, and we have no real reason to not be engaging into teamwork. Maybe next time, we could create a plan, where every one is involved and everyone has something to do.