Week1- "Introduction..." (Chaebin Park 박채빈)

 1. Summary

This week’s class introduced us to the fundamentals of Wikipedia — how it works, its structure, and its philosophy. Wikipedia is a nonprofit online encyclopedia that allows anyone around the world to freely access and contribute knowledge. I learned about its history, editing process, community governance, and content licensing under the Creative Commons license. I found it particularly interesting that while Wikipedia encourages the free sharing of knowledge, it still emphasizes copyright and responsible content creation.


2) Interesting Points

Wikipedia is not just a platform for storing information — it’s a living, evolving community where people from different backgrounds collaborate to build collective knowledge. Its openness and autonomy are truly fascinating, and I was impressed by the mechanisms the community has in place to ensure reliability and accuracy.

What also caught my attention was the fact that Wikipedia is available in numerous languages and has many sister projects such as Wikidata and Wikivoyage. This highlights how knowledge can be diversified and applied in many different forms, expanding the potential of collaborative intelligence.


3) Personal Expectations and Goals

I often use Wikipedia as a go-to source for research, so I’m already very familiar with it as a user. However, I’ve never contributed to it by editing or adding content myself. Through this course, I hope to learn how to make meaningful contributions to Wikipedia, including how to add information properly and revise content according to its formatting and standards.

I’m genuinely looking forward to this experience. Learning how to write in a way that is objective, verifiable, and consistent with Wikipedia’s style will not only be interesting but also beneficial for my writing and communication skills in general.


4) Discussion

As a nonprofit platform, what motivates volunteers to continue contributing and maintaining the content? What drives such sustained engagement?



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