Throughout middle school and high school, I remember using Wikipedia for everything, until I heard that it wasn’t reputable or good, and that I shouldn’t use it to write papers. So, throughout the rest of high school, I avoided Wikipedia like the plague when I wrote papers. Of course, I still used it here in there when I was researching unimportant things that I just wanted general knowledge on, but I never used it again for school papers, that is until college. In college, one of my English professors told us to use Wikipedia to write our papers. I was confused and conflicted at this remark. What he meant was that we should use Wikipedia to get an idea of our writing topics, so we understand the gist of our topic, and click through the references of that the Wikipedia article provides because most often than not, those references are actually reputable and credible sources. He reassured us that he doesn’t want our papers to be based on a Wikipedia article but that he believes that Wikipedia is a good place to start, when digging for more information.
I never thought about writing a Wikipedia article myself, so this assignment definitely took me by surprise. I seemed like a fun and challenging assignment. I would definitely say that find a topic to write about was definitely the hardest part about creating a Wikipedia entry. Literally everything is almost already taken and covered. You’d have to get very creative in your word choice or that you decide to write about, and that is exactly what I did. I knew the Hmong community didn’t have much coverage as it is, so I decided to create an article on one of my most favorite Hmong movies as a child. I grew up watching this Hmong movie as a child, and my friends in the Hmong community did to. As I knew it, this film was ground breaking for the Hmong community, the first ripple in the water for other Hmong films to follow. Kuv Leej Niam was a film created by a Hmong-immigrant who lives in Minnesota, Moua Lee. The film is about a Hmong woman as she struggles through life, battling cultural, social, and economic hardships. It tells of the struggle of a young girl grows into woman and eventually a mother. I knew I had to write about this film because it correlated so well with my website about child and adults.
The first thing I did was try to find any information I could on the film. I wasn’t surprised when I couldn’t find anything. The only thing I found was a IMDB site with minimal basic information. The only other source I found was a library catalog called “WorldCat” which had copies of the film available to the public. Other than this the only other thing I used was the film itself that I found on YouTube. These weren’t very good sources and I understood that but with little to no coverage on the Hmong community and the Hmong film industry in general, I didn’t have expectations.
The second hardest part about a film like the one I chose was the fact that it was entirely in a different language. Since it’s been a while, I decided to re-watch the whole film over again so I could have a grasp about what happened again. Then I went back again and watched it in sections, so I can write it out and summarize it. I had to stop midway to condense my writing because I had written nearly five pages on only the first thirty minutes of the film. Translating was hard and I had to make the choice to cut down on less important dialogue to be able to write more on the more important pieces of the film and required more describing to accurately translate the dialogue. It was definitely hard but ultimately fun to watch it in detail and discover things I missed when previously watching the movie.
The most important thing I’ll take away from this Wikipedia article assignment would be that Wikipedia work hard on what they write. There is a lot that goes into writing a Wikipedia article. A lot of time and energy and research done to cover topics, big and small. I can say that we should give more credit to Wikipedia for doing what they do. Of course I do keep in mind that anyone can write an article on Wikipedia, but I am also reassured that the information I find on wiki has been reviewed, revised, edited, reviewed, revised, and edited again. The team at Wikipedia has a system and are working to make the best of what they have to bring the people what they need and ask for, and I applaud that.
I have submitted my article to be reviewed and published if saw fit, by the Wikipedia time. I feel like the people who would read my article entry would possibly be people who visit my website and hear about my Wikipedia article entry and other people in the Hmong community. Those people in the Hmong community who read the entry would also be the ones to edit my article. I know that I must have gotten at least one thing less than accurate, if not more—translating Hmong is hard.
At the moment I am still working on getting the Wikipedia article published so that it can be made available to the public, but if you have a Wikipedia account you can possibly view the draft here, Kuv Leej Niam.
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