My experience with Wikipedia

In my experience, Wikipedia’s overall editing process was fairly simple. I tried to make an edit with an account I created, but it was blocked. The reason given was that my username represented an organization, group, or company website. It suggested I was welcome to make a new account with a different username, but when I tried, I kept getting an error message. After looking up Wikipedia’s policy, I was able to make the edit using my IP address instead of my username. As instructed by the assignment, I submitted comments explaining why I planned to make the change, but I have not received any replies yet.

As a native of Gainesville, Florida, I have personal experience with the weather there. While searching for climate information on Wikipedia, I noticed it said Gainesville experiences 20 days of freezing temperatures or below during the cool season. My edit was based on weather data I pulled from the Weatherspark.com website. After doing some manual calculations from the graph published on the site, I determined that the city experiences 10-15 days of freezing temperatures or below. My edit was: “In the winter season, from late December to early January, Gainesville experiences about 10 to 15 nights of temperatures at freezing or below, with sustained freezes every few years.” After checking the weather data, I confirmed that Gainesville is in North Florida and is about 1.5 hours inland from both the east and west coasts. This location is why it only experiences 10-15 freezing days. My edit, based on my calculations and the weather data, made it clear which months Gainesville, Florida can experience freezing temperatures.

After my editing experience, my view of Wikipedia has changed. I used to think you had to be a scholar with special permissions to edit a page. Now that I’m learning more about it, I see it more as a community-driven resource than a scholarly journal. My view is still fairly positive because it's a free resource, but I now see it as a community information hub rather than a scientific or scholarly journal. In my experience, navigating the user interface, especially the editing page, is still quite difficult. I find both the editing and reader views to be really confusing. When I was trying to make an edit, I was a little hesitant to delete something by mistake or to add a link in the wrong section. Honestly, while it's a free and helpful resource, the chaotic nature of it is very frustrating for me.

Personally, if I ever need information for a college research paper or personal project that requires accurate information, I'd rather pay for a scientific journal or an encyclopedia to cite. I would also be more willing to look for articles from news outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times, or Vox to cite information properly and navigate easily. This is because I would rather spend some money than a lot of time trying to figure out the user interface and verifying edits by going to each individual website from Wikipedia. I'd rather save as much time as possible and make my life easier. This difficulty in navigating the user interface is a reason I would avoid using Wikipedia, because it takes a serious amount of time to properly understand the information and verify it when there are so many hyperlinks on every page.

Below is the link to the article I edited:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gainesville,_Florida

Source used to edit:

https://weatherspark.com/y/16986/Average-Weather-in-Gainesville-Florida-United-States-Year-Round