Matthew.meyers5

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Hello, Matthew.meyers5, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:42, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Hi Matthew! Great to see you here. I'm Mathis, a sophomore in Ezra Stiles studying political science and philosophy. Academically, I am deeply interested in communitarian thought, localism, and participatory democracy. Outside of class, I play the viola, write columns for the YDN, and spend an excessive amount of time at the Yale Political Union. I hope that your first week of classes went well (I know that your schedule is very ambitious!), and I look forwards to working with you next semester. --MathisBitton (talk) 01:48, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Hi Mathis, good to see you here. I'm a first-year in Berkeley undeclared in my major but will likely double major in political science and either History or Econ, but considering how much my plans have changed so far who knows if those will end up as my major. I love evaluating modern political institutions and thinking about ways to reform them. Outside of classes, I may be preparing my argument for Moot Court or advocating for voter rights laws with Every Vote Counts. I look forward to hearing more of your insights throughout the year. Matthew.meyers5 (talk) 05:28, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Blog Post 1

2/8/21

The writers of Wikipedia are simultaneously at center stage and completely hidden. Every time I go to Wikipedia for information, I think back to the constant warnings about how anyone can edit Wikipedia, with the constant warnings about the potential trolls and ill-informed writers preventing me from ever fully trusting the site. At the same time, every time I go on a page brimming with information about a well-known topic or containing a starting point to research a niche topic more deeply, I never stop to consider the dedicated writers who added the extra details to an already thorough page or who took the time to create an entry that there is no certainty anyone would ever read, all simply out of the belief that knowledge should be shared. In beginning my time as a writer for Wikipedia, I hope to appreciate these writers who edit for fun or out of a sense of service and to maybe be inspired to continue in their ranks at the conclusion of the assignment.

Among the training exercises taken this week, one article stood out to me as particularly relevant to our class: “Wikipedia is an Online Encyclopedia.” This seemingly obvious statement was justified by describing a number of things that Wikipedia is not, including “It’s not …, an experiment in … democracy.” Because my Wikipedia experience comes in the context of a class on democracy, this line caught my attention. Despite their warnings against it, it is not hard to think of Wikipedia as, if not an experiment, an exercise in democracy. Wikipedia makes no distinction between expert and layman, participation is voluntary, and everyone can enjoy the full benefits of the service. Like democracy, it is often criticized for the very things that define it: its openness and egalitarian commitment to allow full participation for all. Critics point out the inherent risk in trusting the general public, both for encyclopedic knowledge and governance, but both Wikipedia and democracy have seen their standing among elites improve over time as the populace proves themselves capable of more self-regulation than was thought possible by established institutions. Wikipedia may not be an experiment in democracy, but it is certainly a celebration of it and a monument to trust in the human capacity for true self-rule. In this way, it is almost poetic to use Wikipedia to investigate the modern political theory of democracy. As I read scholarly analysis and debate of the merits of specific democratic institutions, I will be engaging with a community that is a testament to democracy itself—a true union of theory and practice.

Blog Post 2

My Wikipedia training this week was focused on defining a good Wikipedia article. I learned about different classifications of articles based on how detailed and well-reviewed they are. After learning about this, I had the chance to review my own article. I followed a template that WikiEdu provided to do a detailed evaluation of the article. This template prompted me to think about several elements of article quality that I had never considered before. For example, I considered the lead section of the article more carefully than I ever had before. The lead section is what people interact with most when they view Wikipedia and it may even define what someone knows about a topic if they are just going to Wikipedia for a cursory overview of a topic. This experience also reinforced my awareness of the hidden engine of Wikipedia that I was introduced to last week: the dedicated editors. Even on a relatively incomplete article like the one I evaluated, there was a team of people in the talk section and in the edit history who were discussing the best way to improve the article. Reviewing this article also gave me a view of some of the risks of crowdsourcing. There were certainly a few portions of the article where it was clear that several people had written it without much coordination. These sections had very few natural transitions between facts making it very choppy.

I also learned how to edit a Wikipedia article. While the visual edit is pretty much a simple word processor, learning to use Wikicode was interesting. While I am probably going to mostly use the visual editor, using Wikicode was actually sort of cool. I am using LaTeX in another class and Wikicode has a similar premise, but it is more optimized for adding links and citations than mathematical symbols. I would be curious to know how many people use Wikicode and how many people use the visual editor. Since the talk section is entirely held in Wikicode, I would imagine most experienced editors are at least familiar with it.

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May 2021

Hi Matthew.meyers5! I noticed that you recently marked an edit as minor at Citizens Convention for Climate that may not have been. "Minor edit" has a very specific definition on Wikipedia – it refers only to superficial edits that could never be the subject of a dispute, such as typo corrections or reverting obvious vandalism. Any edit that changes the meaning of an article is not a minor edit, even if it only concerns a single word. Please see Help:Minor edit for more information. Thank you. Kj cheetham (talk) 22:18, 17 May 2021 (UTC)