User:Afosorno/report

Ana Osorno

Wikipedia Reflection Essay - Com 482

Feb. 17th, 2020

1. Provide detailed, concrete, and actionable advice to the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation. What should Wikipedia think about doing? What should they think about changing?

Two things that Wikipedia can do and change to better support new wikipedians:


 * 1) I think that Wikipedia should give people the option to be notifed when people edit your personal additions to an article so that you can learn why it may have been changed. I think that many people do not stay up to date with their articles and forget to check back but it is important to continue to improve your articles and as students, it is important to learn from other experienced editors. I know that I was shocked to look back at my article after a few days and see all of the changes that were made that I didn’t know were made. So in the future I think this would help me be a better contributor. Also this would help maintain the online community better and help wikipedians to learn injucitve norms through the behaviors that people approve.
 * 2) As students in an online communities class, one has to recognize that we were extrinsically motivated to contribute to Wikipedia since our contribution related to a grade in our class. But because we are already extrinsically motivated, I think that a way to continue to motivate new wikipedians/students is to offer us barnstars that are specifically for students. As we learned in class, something that motivates people are rewards that are internal to the community such as social recognition. In this case, I think that barnstars would help us know more about how we are doing, motivate us to continuously improve our articles, and also see what other students get barnstars for so that we can learn from their articles and know how to improve our own. Not only that, but earning barnstars would become good motivators for people to keep working and contributing beyond the classroom setting since they will likely want to continue to earn barnstars and recognition.

2. Comment directly on your experience in Wikipedia. What did you do and what did you learn?

During this course I was able to work on a wikipedia article about Tyler Mitchell who is a photographer from Georgia and one of my biggest role models. Aside from my major in Communications, I am also majoring in Photo/Media and I was excited to do my article related to to photography. I previously knew of Mitchell and remember being disappointed because there was not that much information about him on Wikipedia and I wanted to know more. So when I learned that editing a wikipedia article was going to be one of our tasks I quickly knew which one I would work on. It was interesting and enlightening to work on a wikipedia article that I had personally looked at before I began this class. I loved that through my experience of becoming a wikipedian and an editor, I was able to spend time conducting research and learning about topics that interest and excite me. It was definitely enlightening and at times a bit difficult to work on a page about a live person, I felt as though sometimes the wikipedia tutorials did not help as much with biographies especially when it came to sources and citing. I felt a bit lost as to how to find good sources when I was writing a biography of an artist.

3. Connect your experience in Wikipedia explicitly to the concepts in the course material we have covered. Justify your recommendations in terms of the theories and principles we've covered. Why should your recommendations be taken more seriously than just random advice from one new user?


 * 1) I think that when looking back at the beginning of the class, Wikipedia as a whole and our class structure did a great job of following the first three design claims from our book. Design claim 1 states that if you easily list the needed contributions, there is a higher likelihood that the community will provide them. When first looking for sites to potentially work on, it was great that Wikipedia offered a whole page of where to look and a list of stubs to work on. By making it easier to find and clearly listing it out, more people are able to work on the pages that need help.
 * 2) Similarly, Design Claim 2 states that you should “provide easy to use tools for finding and tracking work that needs to be done increases the amount that gets done”. In this case, Wikipedia tracks all of the stubs and even puts them into their own categories and subcategories. Doing so made it really easy to find out what pages needed work and it was also really easy to find pages to work on that interested me.
 * 3) Lastly, Design Claim 3 states that rather than randomly assigning pages, one should ask people to perform tasks that interest them and that they can perform which leads to increased contributions. I think that our class structure did a really good job of following this design claim by allowing students to pick whatever page they wanted to work on or create. I believe that this allowed students to be more invested in the work that they were doing and work harder than they might have had we all randomly been assigned to pages that we did not care about or know anything about originally. Not only that, but because of the way the wikiedu site was structured, I think it did a really great job at preparing students to contribute to wikipedia and feel confident that we could perform to the standards that were expected.

4. If possible, reflect on what parts of the theories or concepts we covered applied or didn't. You don't have to take everything taught in the course for granted. What would you change or add based on your experience? What is unique or different about Wikipedia?

I think that working on Wikipedia was extremely useful and helped me better understand what we were learning in class. But I also believe that some concepts in class were harder to grasp because they did not relate to Wikipedia and therefore we did not get to experience them first hand. In class we looked over the different codes of conduct and guidelines for the Ruby, Ubuntu, and Gnome sites and discussed what happens when those codes are violated. But, since we as wikipedians were part of a class structure, we did not directly get notified of our personally violations of conduct such as using copyrighted images or not citing correctly. Instead, all complaints went to Salt and Mako. Although I do understand that we are still learning and being trained, I believe that this gave students less of an opportunity to personally experience breaking a norm and what the consequences and results of that are. Another way to give us more experience and learn norms would be to interact with other wikipedia users and making changes to pages from the beginning. For example, we could have small tasks throughout the quarter that allows us to work on live pages and learn from other users.