Publishing edits on Wikipedia was a new experience for me that provided me with a lot of insight on public research. I found working on a resource for the public to be really engaging, as I knew I was working on something that truly mattered and had the potential to make an impact. I enjoyed knowing that my work would be available to anyone who wanted to learn about Jenny Levy and women’s lacrosse. Women’s lacrosse definitely lacks proper recognition in many cases, so I love that I had the opportunity to expand the information available about this sport. From my research, I learned that Jenny Levy has many more accolades and achievements than I had previously thought. She has led multiple teams to extremely impressive seasons, and has earned a huge amount of awards as a result of her success. Additionally, I learned that she was a dominant player in her time, leading her team to their first ever national championship. I’m glad I got to add a lot of these achievements to the article, they are impressive feats that deserve recognition. Throughout the process of editing my article, I learned about the inner workings of Wikipedia, which I hadn’t known before. Since I have usually been told by my teachers to stay away from Wikipedia, this was the first time I had ever truly explored the site. I never knew about the talk page, and how edits are often taken down and changed by other users. The community element of Wikipedia was brand new to me, as the sheer amount of editors that are constantly changing and improving articles on a multitude of topics fascinated me. Another new aspect of this editing process was the concept of plagiarism in these edits. While I knew that I could not copy someone else’s words very closely or quote someone else without any citation, I was unaware that things like similar sentence structure have the potential to be flagged as plagiarism. In the past, I had thought that replacing words with synonyms would suffice for most cases, but now I know that taking information from a source requires much more than that. So, this was a part of the project that I had trouble with at first, I didn’t know how to put what I was reading into my own words in a way that would be acceptable to Wikipedia. However, the modules that demonstrated examples of plagiarism versus paraphrased work were very helpful and allowed me to gain a better understanding of how to compile my information for my article. I felt that physically making the edits to the Wikipedia article was much easier than I had assumed it to be, between the modules and in class instruction, the site was relatively easy to navigate. The difficult part was at the beginning of the process, when I had to decide what needed to be added to the article. Since my article was a stubs class and had little information, it was almost overwhelming how much information could have been added. But, after looking through similar articles about other collegiate coaches and seeing what general information these articles had, I was able to narrow down a couple of categories that I could focus on adding to. Overall, this project provided me with a fresh perspective on Wikipedia, it is no longer a website I feel the need to avoid, but one that I am eager to revisit.
Link to article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Levy
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