User:Alialm97/Report

Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubai_Shopping_Festival

For my article on Wikipedia I chose to write about the Dubai Shopping Festival. Throughout my editing experience, I found that I discovered the most about Wikipedia in areas where I struggled. In the initial processes of article choice, it took me quite some time to find an article with a topic that I had interest toward that had not already been written about. Kraut et al. in design claim three states that “[C]compared to asking people at random, asking people to perform tasks that interest them and that they are able to perform increases contributions” (27); however, since Wikipedia has thousands of articles and volunteers working on these articles, most of the more popular topics of interest have already been written on, leaving more than two-thirds of the articles to be marked as stubs (Kraut et al. 21). Problems of contribution occur since many of the tasks that need to be done may not be the most appealing to all volunteers (Kraut et al. 22). Having to choose secondary article topics rather than the most favored topics to write on might push away a lot of new Wikipedians from even attempting to write an article.

Though Wikipedia has tried to combat this by categorically organizing the stubs, I think further action can be taken to help new contributors with topic choice. While I struggled with choosing my topic, some resources that I found helpful were already existing Wikipedia articles. Looking at previous articles written by classmates allowed me to see what kind of work was acceptable for beginners. One suggestion I might make to the Wikipedia community is to implement example pages of smaller articles that do not have too much extensive content. Taking from the ideas of design claims 11 and 12, new contributors will be more likely to choose from requests, in this case the designated stub articles, if the requests come from others who are similar to them and when they see that other people have complied (Kraut et al. 33, 35). With this in mind, Wikipedia could create updates on what articles have currently or recently been created from stubs by new users that have been successful. Similar to the Scratch example given in the lecture, it would allow users to not only understand what types of articles they could create, but also give them a place to start editing. The talk page in turn could act as a place for social interaction between the new users on the new page. Fostering interaction among new users and providing them with examples of similar pages to edit follows design concepts 3 and 9, increasing identity-based commitment through similarities of being new user and going through interdependent tasks (Kraut et al. 82, 85).

Beyond topic choice, another important and difficult part of the Wikipedia process was finding information on a topic. Since Wikipedia does not allow use of most scholarly articles, I had difficulty in finding information that I knew would come from a credible source. Through my editing experience I realized how detailed the process was for source-credibility and other rules such as topic notability. In general, most of the problems I found on Wikipedia seemed to revolve around norms and regulation. The norms (or rules) on Wikipedia were very specific, so the problem was not necessarily with the rules themselves, but the sheer amount of rules within Wikipedia. Since the rules are all made by the community and not necessarily common sense, they are injunctive norms that many new Wikipedians cannot easily learn and may be punished for breaking even if they acted with good faith intentions. Some resources that helped combat against these problems of norm violation were places like the Teahouse. In lecture, we went over Kraut’s three ways to motivate online community participation, of which the Teahouse was a perfect example of. The Teahouse used persuasive techniques through allowing introductions and profile pictures, made contributing more intrinsically interesting through conversation and clear feedback responses, and created motivators by giving out barn stars. As Wikipedia is a page made up of volunteers, the support it garners is mostly from affective commitment. The Teahouse provided a good resource of bonds-based affective commitment with a page for posting profile pictures, captions, and having the opportunity to talk with other new members like themselves (Kraut el al. 91-92, 94).

Though pages like the Teahouse are great tools for beginner users, many users, like me, want to start editing right away and tend to ignore these helpful resources. My recommendations for the Wikipedia Community on problems of norm understanding and ignorance would be to further develop mechanisms for helping new users to contribute effectively and not scare away so easily. On page 221, one idea Kraut et al. suggests is the implementation of progressive access controls, such as restricting newcomers to “newcomer only” pages. Though this would effectively reduce damage done by newcomers, this would also go against Wikipedia’s notion of allowing anyone to edit anything. Instead, taking from design claim 20, “[O]offering people reminders at the point of an action that may violate norms reduces the number of offenses” (Kraut et al. 210). The key part of this statement is offering reminders at the point of action. Since Wikipedia is made up of mainly a vast system of volunteers, it might be hard to try and screen through every new article that is posted. Rather than reactive tactics like speedy deletion though, Wikipedia should try implementing techniques centered on proactivity. For example, notifications could pop up if it’s the first time a user is making an edit to an actual Wikipedia page or attempting to move their page saying “did you remember to cite your sources?” or “visit Teahouse to get your article evaluated first.”  This would teach and remind users of the injunctive norms in the community, while also preventing early departure of new users.