Delilah (Rosie) Catron

Prior to being part of the International Privacy Literacy project, I believed a lot of the misconceptions about Wikipedia. Just as I was told growing up, I didn’t think Wikipedia was a reliable source, despite the fact that Wikipedia was often the first place I checked when searching a topic online. When it came to the editing process, the only thing I really knew was that anyone from anywhere was able to write anything. However, from my new experience with this lab, I understand that it is for this exact reason that makes Wikipedia the important resource that it is. 

During the course of the semester, I contributed to the International Privacy Literacy project by first going through multiple training sessions about how to edit Wikipedia and follow Wikipedia’s many rules and then eventually editing and uploading articles related to privacy and cybersecurity on the French Wikipedia mainspace. Here I discovered the richness of the Wikipedia community I didn’t know existed. It is truly incredible to me how much knowledge has been able to be archived on Wikipedia across many languages, due simply to the work of volunteers who have something to share. I especially love the interface of Wikipedia’s “behind-the-scenes” of the articles that look like that of a chatboard from the early 2000s, where every message is saved and displayed in threads, and users possess their own personalized pages where they can display banners and information about themselves and talk with others. It has been a welcome reminder of all the good and the positive the internet has been able to provide as a result of connecting people. My old misconception that the openness made Wikipedia unreliable was also squashed by the fact that the community, including bots and Wiki-fanatics alike, are very good at checking new edits and each other. Plus, when you’re attempting to practically chronicle all the information of mankind onto one website, it’s certainly a good thing to allow people of every possible background to contribute to that goal. 

Specifically, some of the tasks I did each week relating to editing and uploading onto French Wikipedia included participating in a weekly “add 5/edit 5” task where I would search privacy and cybersecurity related topics on French Wikipedia and improve them by oftentimes adding citations or updating facts and statistics. Doing so was very enjoyable because I like falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes on my own time, so I got to learn a lot about a wide variety of topics related to privacy in the US and around the world. Doing so also helped my French language skills, taking what I was learning in the classroom to a real-life application. It also broadened my sense of how different populations look at privacy across the world. Additionally, I reviewed two already translated articles about “Social Profiling” and “Celebrity Privacy” before uploading them to Wikipedia, which too was a rewarding experience knowing that even the relatively simple act of publishing these articles now will broaden privacy literacy on French Wikipedia forever. Finally I translated an article that will later be published about “Ride-share Privacy.” From my interactions with these articles I gained deep knowledge and insight I previously did not possess into each of the topics because in editing and translating the articles in order to convey the contents to a French audience, I had to really process what was being said and oftentimes simplify what was being originally said in English. One specific takeaway for me is that people’s privacy, whether it’s of celebrities or regular people who often use ride-share apps, needs greater regulation moving forward in order to ensure the safety of everyone involved.

I thoroughly enjoyed and learned so much this semester. Forever I’ll be able to contribute to Wikipedia and forever I’ll be able to check on how my work this semester has been improved upon and utilized.