Wiki Travel: motivation

Yesterday when I was working on my wikitravel page for the Mohawk Trail, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that "my talk" had a red circle blinking next to it. I wasn't quite sure what it was, and flashing red when you're editing never really makes you feel to good, so i decided to check it out. When I clicked on it I found this message:

"Hey Jon, Welcome to Wikitravel.

To help get you started contributing, we've created a tips for new contributors page, full of helpful links about policies and guidelines and style, as well as some important information on copyleft and basic stuff like how to edit a page. If you need help, check out Wikitravel:Help, or post a message in the travellers' pub.

I really like the itinerary you have been working on, and I hope you keep filling it out! I noticed, though, that much of the content comes from what appears pretty clearly to be your blog [1]. Just so there is no confusion over authorship, you may want to make a note of this at Talk:The Mohawk Trail. Keep up the good work! --Peter Talk 16:50, 9 March 2010"

 When I read this, it kind of gave me a little bit of a feeling of an accomplishment. I stated working on the page only as a project for class, but knowing that people are actually looking at what I am posting and that it's live on the web, it really gave me some encouragement to keep working on this page even after the project. Having someone just drop me a message simply to recognize me work, compliment it, and offer me some suggestions is really, to me, what made this project worth while. And I think that was the whole point of this project. To throw us into and let us experiences something exactly like that...an information ecology you may say lol

No comments:

Post a Comment