CherylGourley

About Me

I am Cheryl Gourley and I am from Northern Ireland. I am a second year Digital Media student at the School of Arts and new Media at the University of Hull, Scarborough Campus. I have a passion for photography, product design and branding. Some of my work is available at behance.net/Cheryl_Gourley. I am interested in developing new ideas with other digital media enthusiasts. I also enjoy working with people from other creative fields to gain new points of view as it can vary your own personal views therefore creating better work as a multimedia team.

Wikipedia page I am working on

I have created and developed the page Site Gallery for one of my modules; Interaction Experience and Engagement. The Site Gallery is a multimedia gallery which has hosted numerous events and exhibitions. It has also been a host for an international digital media and art festival Lovebytes, in both 2006 and 2007.

Personal Reflection

Content

The page I decided to work on was for the Site Gallery in Sheffield, this page linked to the Lovebytes page which was the topic that interested me the most. The Site Gallery is a multimedia art gallery which hosts events both on site and off site, exhibitions, educational events and installations. The gallery regularly have exclusive interviews with artists' both international and local. They are a registered charity and are mainly staffed by volunteers. The Site Gallery are often involved in helping new artists develop their skills and allow them to hold exhibitions to begin their career.

I have found only a few primary sources for my article on Wikipedia as the Site Gallery's website is the main source I found information from. I also found information from the Lovebytes website as it held information about the festivals which were partly hosted by the gallery.

All of the information included on the Site Gallery Wikipedia page has been written by myself, I have included information about visiting the gallery, the staff, artist information, information about their educational events and exhibitions. I have also included information about the opportunities, which are available to young people and artists through the gallery. The Wikipedia page for Site Gallery also includes information about hiring space within the gallery and about the many ways it is possible to support the gallery as they are a registered charity.

My user page has three sections; which are ‘About Me’, ‘Wikipedia pages I am working on’ and my ‘Personal Reflection’ on this assignment. The about me section tells people a little bit about myself, where I am from, what I am interested in and what I am studying at University. I have also included a link to a portfolio based website, where some of my work can be seen. The Wikipedia pages I am working on contains a short piece of information about the page for the Site Gallery. The final section on this page is my personal reflection on creating the Site Gallery Wikipedia page.

Understanding

Throughout this exercise I have learnt that it is very easy to edit information on Wikipedia. You can edit any page even though the information you are inserting my not be 100% true or factual in any way. I do not particularly enjoy using Wikipedia for any assignments as it is hard to reference it to a particularly scholarly source, however it can be used as a good place to start. External references that are included in Wikipedia pages can be used as factual information more than the Wikipedia page itself. There are people who edit Wikipedia regularly that monitor the editing of pages however if you were to edit or create a not so popular page I am not sure anyone would re-edit the information therefore leaving it to chance that it may be factually correct.

I was concerned that these ‘Wikipedians’ may not believe my information or layout be good enough for Wikipedia therefore I contained my information to my Sandbox where I could edit it over and over without worry of others commenting on the information until I was ready to post it properly on Wikipedia. I also included the course page banner on the Site Gallery page so that others were aware the page was a project for University.

Engagement

I have represented myself on my user page as a student who has a keen in photography and other elements of digital media, which is my true self. I have also included information about the Wikipedia page, which is specifically for this module as I am not a keen Wikipedian. I have talked to Andrea through my talk page using the talkback function; I found this useful as we could pass information through the Talk site about Wikipedia therefore interacting through the site we were talking about. This was my most important engagement on Wikipedia as no other people on Wikipedia edited my page and it allowed easy communication about the project. I researched the standard Wikipedia layout through reading other pages such as Batman, as this page has been heavily edited and is in the standard Wikipedia layout. Through reading the edit history on popular pages I have seen how Wikipedia can be used to communicate and also share a hobby with other people you may never have met yet.