User:Aliwall/Report

When starting this course at Week 1, I knew minimal about writing articles for Wikipedia. While I had visited Wikipedia hundreds of times, scoring for a quick and easy overview of a topic, I had never considered writing my own article or even wondered what that process may be like. However, throughout the past seven weeks, I’ve discovered that writers for Wikipedia put in a great deal of work to provide the most up-to-date and accurate information about topics, people, things, or events for their readers. I’m excited to be able to report and share my findings about use easability of the platform and hopefully provide useful information on how to improve it so that more people around the world choose to contribute to the site.

My article on Fremont Brewery was an established article already, however it was graded fairly low and didn’t provide accurate information regarding the more recent growth of the Seattle based brewery. I chose this topic because I wanted to contribute information to people in my community. While anyone with internet access can read this information, I figured people in the Seattle or Pacific Northwest would benefit the most from it. Adding information to an established article was easy, however I’m not sure if it would be as simple to provide all the information to an untouched topic. I know that some of my classmates chose to do this, however it seems as if that process would be more challenging to work with. After reading and reviewing the material already written as well as the sources they cited, I began doing independent research of my own to discover what useful information I could provide of my own. Compiling the bibliography for this topic wasn’t very difficult considering I didn’t have to scour through academic articles to grasp the newest improvements in beer, company structure or sustainability at Fremont Brewing. Once I felt I completed my research stage, organizing new information into the established article in my sandbox was very intuitive. Headers were a breeze to make, and the in text editing was simple to work with, something that I feel is important for people without experience working with HTML.

A fear of mine when creating my article was working with citations and ensuring I’m providing them correctly in the article. To my surprise, Wikipedia makes this aspect incredibly easy and I am so thankful for that. Being able to cite a sentence was almost too easy, but it ensured that I was backing up every fact I stated in the article. I believe the ease of this feature is something that isn’t known to people without experience writing for Wikipedia, however if more people were aware, there may be more people participating in the article creation.

After completing this assignment and learning more about online communities in lecture, I have a few recommendations for Wikipedia. While writing for Wikipedia was easy after going through the course’s tutorials, people not registered for this class have a steeper learning curve than I did. I would suggest that Wikipedia provides more courses to users across college campuses who may be interested in providing content. Even simply providing quick initial education on how to properly engage with Wikipedia could encourage more writers to improve or create articles. The current issue with Wikipedia is more or less a free rider issue, where millions of people rely on information provided on the site everyday but only a fraction actively participate. Even when asking my classmates if they would continue to participate, most said no. This issue is the result of Wikipedia being a public good because it isn’t excludable, so anyone with access to the internet can read content. Additionally, the amount of people who are reading Wikipedia articles makes it less likely that they will contribute because the responsibility of keeping the website going i spread out among millions. I would recommend that Wikipedia begin advertising these courses on their page. While many would argue that Wikipedia is great because it doesn’t show ads, I think the integration of a small top or side banner on how easy writing for the site is could encourage more to participate.

When working with Wikipedia, I was constantly thinking of more ways in which people would be incentified to participate more, whether that be writing, editing, or talking on articles. At first, I thought giving people monetary rewards would encourage participation, however I quickly realized this idea wouldn’t work following our lecture on incentives on January 13th. The idea that extrinsic rewards can actually crowd intrinsic motivation relates strongly to Wikipedia because as soon as you begin paying people to do the work, the passion and enjoyment when contributing often goes away and people view the task as a job.

This course taught me a lot on the ease of Wikipedia participation, but has also encouraged me to look at my own participation or lack thereof on other platforms. I’m constantly evaluating groups I’m a part of to discover in what ways I could be bribed to contribute more, and what I’ve realized is that often I feel as if I’m not smart or funny enough to provide my own material in these groups, which I figure is an issue to many users across all platforms. This is why I mainly believe that the best thing Wikipedia could do to encourage participation is provide education. I don’t think the everyday person even realizes how simple participation is and therefore assumes others will automatically contribute. Because there are already articles on almost every topic, this education could focus on improving established articles so that readers can access the most up-to-date information. I believe if Wikipedia was able to work with schools, their average quality of each article would increase.

My experience working on this project in class provided me with useful tools to be a more engaged user on all platforms and think more about ways in which platforms could incentivize users to help grow their business. At the end of each year, I remember seeing the notification on Wikipedia’s website encouraging readers to donate money towards the platform to ensure its future. This banner always makes me sad because I recognize the issue that these platforms face, however I hope that with better advertising and education Wikipedia will continue to grow and help the world become more educated on a variety of topics.