UCSD Feminist Dialogues on Technology: Wikipedia

I thought my previous experience dabbling in HTML would help me out with the Wikipedia assignment, which didn't prove to be the case at all. I began by watching the videos that Wikipedia shows you when you sign up, which were rather confusing but somewhat helpful. I chose to edit the Gypsy Robe article because it's a subject that I felt knowledgeable in, and because I already felt the pressure on editing something on Wikipedia with such a large audience, this seemed the safe route for me.

I began by first copying Gyspy Robe wikicode and played with it on sandbox. Even though my work on sandbox was just for me, I found myself being very careful with the words I chose. After becoming a bit more familiar with wikicode, I then moved onto the actual Gypsy Robe wikipedia page to edit. The original page wasn't as detailed as I thought it could be, so I went over to the Actor's Equity Association website and did more research on the ritual, the rules, who's present, and the meaning on passing the robe and adding momentos to it.

With that information now at hand, I created a more structured page by creating a Ritual header, and explaining the ritual, and then going on to state the rules of the ritual. I pushed the original text that had the history to the bottom of the page, now with it's own header as well.

The last thing I wanted to do was add an image of the gypsy robe at the top of the page, but that proved to be the most difficult task. Through trying to find out how I could upload an image, I learned that Wikipedia only accepts images from Wikimedia Commons, and that the image was able to be legally shared. I tried uploading an image, but I was instructed to choose what creative commons the image had, which I of course did not know. Even then I was tempted to upload it and see what happened, but I chose not to, since I'm intimidated by how large Wikipedia is, and what could have been the consequence. So next, I went to getty, wire images, and advanced search on google images to find an image of the gypsy robe that I could legally use. That proved to be a dead end as well. While I found many images, all of them asked for monetary compensation to use said images.

I think the biggest challenge of this assignment might have been myself. Throughout this entire process, I couldn't help but be aware of the large audience that Wikipedia has, and I ended up second guessing the language I used, thinking it wasn't professional enough or how it would be received by wiki users.

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_Robe

Wikipedia username: smthisisu