Katherine Gan

Throughout the course of this semester, I worked as a research assistant under the Coleman Lab, gathering information and learning about topics focused on privacy, surveillance, security. As part of the International Privacy Literacy Project (I-PLP) team, I was responsible for editing pre-translated Wikipedia articles as well as translating a Wikipedia article on my own to be published onto the Spanish Wikipedia mainspace. The work done through the lab is not only significant towards developing our own personal understanding of privacy topics, but also impacts millions of others who may read these articles regarding these topics. It is important that individuals both recognize and understand their own privacy and security rights, and providing accurate information about these topics is crucial to have published on Wikipedia.

Each week, the assignments I completed were done with the goal of improving my familiarity with Wikipedia editing and developing my understanding of privacy, surveillance, and security related topics. Typically, I would be finding new articles that dealt with these topics and editing them to be more clear, detailed, and properly formatted. Through this process, I was not only able to gain confidence making edits to real Wikipedia articles, but also learn more about how these privacy and security issues are seen and handled in both English and Spanish-speaking countries. From my research, I found that privacy and security are extremely important matters to both these English and Speaking-speaking countries and are handled very seriously. As such, the work done by our lab is very significant towards maintaining the standards of information privacy within these countries.

The three primary articles I was working with covered the topics of privacy in education, ride-sharing privacy, and social profiling. Learning about the many different privacy rights that students are protected to within the realm of education was both surprising and enlightening to me, as I discovered the many efforts being made to protect individuals’ information and data from abuse. As a student myself, this definitely made me more aware and comfortable with my own rights. Ride-sharing privacy was also something that I had already been somewhat aware of, as it is frequently discussed in different media platforms today. However, translating the article did solidify my understanding of many of these instances and I enjoyed gaining more insight into how companies are dealing with these issues, especially since data privacy is such a primary concern today. Reading about social profiling was a very interesting experience, as I personally enjoy data analytics and thought that learning more about the process of constructing profiles would be something particularly exciting to work on. While the actual abuse of data is definitely something to watch out for, I thought that the process of analyzing user data could be something that is particularly useful in certain appropriate situations.

Reviewing and editing the pre-translated articles was definitely the easier of the two primary tasks. For the articles I was reviewing, the translations were all relatively strong and I had little difficulty understanding them. Comparing the translations to the original article in English, I felt that the structure and flow of both articles I reviewed were kept consistent and the overall message that was intending to be conveyed was also maintained. On the other hand, translating the article about ride-sharing privacy from English to Spanish was much more difficult. When I utilized translation tools online, many of them created syntax errors or changed the flow and meaning of the sentences. As a result, I had to manually edit each sentence and ensure that the message it was conveying was consistent in both languages. Despite it being a pretty long and tedious process, I do believe that I was able to really develop my understanding of privacy in ride-sharing services and also re familiarize myself with the Spanish language.

When working with the Spanish Wikipedia portal, my team and I found that there were actually two different ways to create a new page. The first, and probably most typical way, was to publish the article by moving it from my personal sandbox onto the main space through the simple feature built-in to Wikipedia. However, there was a catch to this specifically for Spanish 

Wikipedia, where I was required to have made around 45-50 edits to pages in order to have the option to move my article from my sandbox to the main space. The alternative option was to look up the title of the article I wanted to create, and if there was no article that already existed with that title, there was the option to create it straight from that search by clicking on a red “crearlo” button. This bypassed the need to have a certain number of edits completed and allowed for the creation of a new article straight from that page.

Given the remote semester, it was definitely more difficult to communicate with both my mentors and peers. However, I believe that the leadership team made extremely successful efforts to develop relationships and be as helpful as possible. The easter eggs that we sent to our project teams every week was something I really enjoyed, as it was nice to get a glimpse of what others were up to in their lives. Overall, I had a good experience working in the lab and was able to better solidify my understanding of what I hope to pursue.