When I was told I had to come up with a topic to create a Wikipedia page about, I was immediately stumped because my first though was “what isn’t there a Wikipedia page about?” It seems as though there is a Wikipedia answer for everything nowadays, which imposed my first problem of this assignment: what should I write about? Then I started thinking about my own knowledge and passions and what I would know a lot about that maybe others would not. And then it hit me: volleyball. Yes there is a page about the game of volleyball on Wikipedia already, but I wanted to create a page for the people interested in the intricacies of the game and for the referees of the game who want to know the in depth rules that college and professionals play. Not just the basic rules that you would learn at a day camp.
I have been playing volleyball competitively since I was about 11 years old. I was almost going to play competitively in college but decided against it, so now I play for the club team at my school instead. Volleyball is one of the most important things in my life, and because of this, it is something I have great knowledge for that I feel others would be interested in learning more about.
One thing for sure that I did not know about Wikipedia was how hard it was to actually get your material out there to the public. Wikipedia has this bad reputation because it is know that “anyone can edit a post.” And yes, while that may be true, there are so many restrictions and rules to actually get an edit approved and then published. There are so many editors that work for Wikipedia that constantly oversee users’ edits and they have the final say as to whether or not a post or edit can go public.
Immediately when i started working on my page, it looked as if I was doing some sort of advanced computer coding. I was completely out of my comfort zone, which is saying a lot because I believe I am pretty technologically savvy. There are so many short cuts and tricks as to how to format your page, for instance, getting a table of contents, or even simply bolding or underlining words and phrases. Thankfully Wikipedia provides a helpful cheat sheet that provides some of the useful codes needed. The draft box looks as follows with my content written in the box as well.
The draft box has you put in your references as well as separating your ideas and making a table of contents all by code, which was something very different than what I was used to.
Looking back on the overall experience with creating this post, I completely underestimated the accuracy and time and effort that goes into Wikipedia. Creating a post on this website is definitely harder than it seems to be. However, the payoff is well worth it. My page is still under submission, however, here is what the draft of my first Wikipedia post looks like. Here is “The Rules of Indoor Volleyball.”
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