User:Alexisvictoria93/reflection

Reflection
Becoming a part of a massive community is easy; the hard part is not becoming overwhelmed by the lengthy rules, norms and expectations that come along with new membership. On Wikipedia, there are a number of processes in place to help newcomers acclimate to the community. Without the guidance of my professor, [user: reagle], and Wikipedia specialist, Amanda Rust, I do not believe that I would feel oriented to the Wikipedia community nor would I feel intrinsically motivated to put in the hours necessary to be a contributing member of the community. In this piece, I will discuss my experiences as a newbie and the way that Wikipedia and it’s members socialize new comers, and protect Wikipedia from vandalism and uneducated editing.

My overall experience on Wikipedia has been positive. First, I created an account and completed the [Wikipedia Training for Students], which was really helpful because it welcomed me to the community, then reviewed the [Five Pillars] and then walked me through the basic and advanced editing skills necessary to produce content on Wikipedia. After I became acquainted with the system I began creating my first Wikipedia article on the basis of The Perfect Article, which is a very useful page to reference when contributing to Wikipedia as an article owner.

Choosing a topic to write about was difficult; there are so many topics already covered on Wikipedia, but there are also a surprising amount of topics with little to no coverage at all. To start I searched a bunch of random topics that I was interested in focusing on, all of which already had a presence on the site. After failing to find a topic on my own, I went to other wikipedia resources like the [Wikipedia:Request Articles] for help and found myself on the [Wikipedia: WikiProject WikiProject] page for [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Indigenous_peoples_of_North_America Indigenous peoples of North America]. From there I found a stub article on a Seminole Indian Battle that happened in my hometown and so I decided to take ownership of expanding the [Battle of the Jupiter Inlet] page to be an objective, notable and connected article.

According to Kraut and Resnick, there are 5 basic problems that every online community needs to consider when it comes to dealing with new comers, these are: 1) recruiting, 2) Selection, 3) Retention, 4) Socialization and 5) Protection . Because I joined Wikipedia as a student within a class program, I cannot speak on the community in terms of problems 1 or 2, and I can assure you that I will not be retained as a member simply because of time and lack of geekdom on any subject; however, I will speak on Wikipedia’s approach to problems 4 and 5, Socialization and Protection.

As a student joining the community along side my class and professor, I had to complete a number of formal training exercises, because of this formal training I would say that I was socialized to Wikipedia using institutional tactics. Institutional socialization is made up of six dimensions: collective (newcomers go through a common set of experiences designed to produce standardized responses to situations), formal (newcomers are segregated from other organizational members and put through experiences tailored to newcomers), sequential (newcomers are given a clear sequence of experiences or stages they will go through), fixed (newcomers are given a fixed timetable regarding when they will move through stages), serial (newcomers observe and get training from experienced role models, who give newcomers a clear view of the experiences that will encounter) and investiture (newcomers receive positive feedback confirming their prior identity). As a class we had Wikipedia Tasks, which were in a particular order, connected to deadlines, and which we completed over the span of about three months. Throughout that time, we: went through the formal training mentioned previously, had a Wikipedia expert act as a role model and resource for questions, were receiving positive feedback, from both Professor Reagle and our expert Amanda, on our talk page and article.

My comfort in the community is very much due to the institutionalized socialization that we were subject to; however, if I was to have joined Wikipedia as an individual and was to have been socialized as such – as I’m sure many Wikipedians were – then my experiences would be very different. By designing a structure that could support both institutional and individual socialization, Wikipedia is prepared for a variety of new comers and allows each user’s experience to be slightly varied. While this may be a compliment to the community’s socialization tactics, there are a number of criticisms that could also apply to this type of free-range orientation.

This brings me to Wikipedia’s approach to the problem of protection. By foregoing a singular and formal socialization process, Wikipedia has set no standard for what level of understanding newbies must get to before they can begin editing. By not establishing these sorts of sanctioned activity for newbies Wikipedia has failed to successfully implement Kraut and Resnicks Design Claim 25, which states: “Progressive access controls reduce the harm a newcomer can do to a community while learning the ropes”.

Progressive access controls are protection mechanisms that allow newcomers to “participate in less-critical tasks initially and then gradually increase their access to more central and important tasks”. Without these access controls newbies to Wikipedia are free to edit most articles, leaving Wikipedia and it’s articles susceptible to accidental and purposeful vandalism by newbies and trolls.

These vulnerabilities are not critical, however, because of the numerous other means of protection in place. As with all the other rules and policies on Wikipedia, the communities [Protection Policy] is no quick read but it is important in the sustainability of the community. There are a number of protection options available for administrators to use to protect individual articles and pages. But what about articles that do not have key administrators? Or stub pages? Or user pages? There are so many places on Wikipedia that a newcomer could potentially screw up.

I am human, I am new and I make mistakes. Fortunately, my mistakes did not warrant a [RTFM] (Read the Fucking Manual) or [FAQ slap], which are common but unpopular among the Wikipedia community. However, I did have a Good Faith interaction with user Jliller who commented on the Battle of Jupiter Inlet talk page. Here you can see Jliller's Comment. In turn, I responded to the comment asking for support for her claim that the page I have been working on is inaccurate. Because Jliller has not responded to my request, I have yet to make any changes. After posting my first article, the article was vandalized by two users, who have since been deleted from the Wikipedia community. The vandalism would have gone almost unnoticed had it not been for the Bots that swooped in an helped me clean up, then the uneducated and rash changes that they made might not have been until I went back to do final edits. However, when I look back at my page history now, the vandalisms and bots are gone. I have not been able to figure out why.

Overall, Wikipedia takes a multifaceted approach to welcoming new comers, which could be more personalized, formal and friendly.