Jordayn Murphy

For my assignment this week, I took a dive into editing within Wikipedia. I chose Kathryn Plummer’s page specifically to edit! She is an American volleyball player who has competed at the collegiate, professional, and international levels. I wanted to choose this page because it felt very close to home. I have followed her for a long time, as I have grown-up playing volleyball my entire life. I’ve always been a fan of Plummer especially when I was playing college volleyball, so it just felt like the right choice. This was a very interesting thing for me to work on because it was familiar, but also something that I knew wouldn’t be heavily edited by other people. Her page had a very solid baseline of information, however, I did notice some details of her most recent Olympic performance that were a little limited.

The specific improvement that I wanted to focus on was adding more detail around her performance/ stats during the 2024 Olympics. The page did mention her participation in the overall outcome of the tournament, but it didn’t include a lot of detail about what she accomplished as an individual player. She was a very key member in that match, and I wanted to provide her specific highlights, that way whoever was reading it could see how much she contributed. After reviewing the Wikipedia page, I did find a reliable sports journalism source that reported on her semifinal performance against Brazil where they stated her stats. This allowed me to include that she had scored 26 points in the semifinal match, 23 of them being kills, and this is what helped the United States advance to the gold medal match.

Before directly editing I followed the Wikipedia editing process and was able to talk about what I intended to add. I introduced myself as a new editor because this is definitely something that I have not done yet. I had explained that I also found reliable sources to include the update on her page. I wasn’t sure if anyone would respond, and sadly no one did, but I did want to attempt to at least follow the correct editing process.

After waiting a little bit, I did go ahead and just make the edit and I also made sure to include a citation to the source I had used. I honestly found that the actual editing process was a lot more straightforward than I had expected. It kind of felt a little scary at first because I was editing on a huge online platform, and once I hit submit the information was visible anywhere, but it was cool to feel like I was contributing information haha! I checked back a little later to see if the edit was removed or changed but it was still there! This definitely gave me a little bit more confidence which was nice!

This process all in all definitely changed how I view Wikipedia. Before this, I honestly thought that Wikipedia was a quick reference site that was not very reliable. However, going through the editing process myself really showed how structured their system is, and that you do have to prove credible sources and also get a community review on what you’re trying to add. I think this made it more clear to me that you can’t really just put anything on there or it won’t last long. Of course there can be a situation where something is wrong, sure, but I think they do a pretty good job at having strong guidelines so if wrong information is put on there it can be deleted off their page fairly quickly. I mean hey, if you even see it’s wrong you can just delete it off there yourself!

This assignment was very fun for me, and it really helped me better understand Wikipedia!  This is definitely an evolving platform, and I think it honestly gives a voice to a lot of individuals interested in journalism! It is cool because you don’t need a journalism degree to be able to start editing things online. I definitely see Wikipedia as a way more credible than I did before, and this is coming from someone who was always told to never trust it! I also of course know it is still important to check sources when using any site, but it definitely makes me feel more comfortable gathering information from here.