User:Allenl5566/Reflection

Po Yen Chueh (Allen)

Student ID#:1570943

COM 482

11/06/2015

I came into this class with zero experience about seriously contributing to such well known online communities (Wikipedia) that I have utilized for basic information throughout my entire high school and college years so far. It has been a very interesting and challenging experience for me.

Most of my college professors always say that “everybody” can edit a Wikipedia article and therefore the creditability of Wikipedia is low. As a result, Wikipedia articles are not qualified for any academic essay’s references. Yet, my curiosity was aroused, who is “everybody”? If making contribution into Wikipedia sounds so easy and simple how come I have no idea what are the policies, rules and processes? By coincidence, I am taking the Interpersonal Media course and one of the major tasks is to write an article on Wikipedia. As soon as I realized that in order to edit Wikipedia some coding language is required, I was nervous because I had a really tough time learning Python from a course I took at my previous college. However, the online student orientation was very helpful and it took away my fears of understanding the coding language on Wikipedia right away. Wikipedia created some very easy-to-use tool buttons (sandbox, talk pages, edit page…etc.) and coding language with clear instruction that substantially increase my motivation to make my article better.

Speaking of rules in Wikipedia, notability, verifiability and neutral point of view are three of the pillars that were repeated again and again by professor Hill during his lectures, thus I believe they are the crucial part of making good Wikipedia articles. I chose this nonprofit organization as my topic – Legacy House, that is where I used to volunteer and choosing a topic related to my passion can truly boost up my motivation. The feedback I received from my professor said that my article’s description of facts was not objective enough (because my tone was too exciting) and that it did not properly follow the “neutral point of view” (NPOV). Meanwhile, I also received some positive feedback about my article which I was glad to see. Applying the concept of receiving feedback from my professor/other Wikipedians and understanding where my article stands at into the course textbook chapter 2, Design Claim 17: Immersive experience with clear goals, feedback, and challenged that exercise people’s skills to their limits but still leave them in control are intrinsically motivation. Realizing that there are people paying attentions to my article and wanting to be involved truly enhance my self-improvement desires.

As I mention in the previous paragraph, receiving positive and negative feedback consider as intrinsic motivation. Enhancing intrinsic motivation can determine whether an online community is successful or not. On the other hand, enhancing extrinsic motivation is another significant factor to keep online communities running well. For example, Wikipedia reward different level contributors with different color and shape of stars on user profile or higher level of authorization. For me, the extrinsic reward of is getting a good grade from my college professor for this class. Since extrinsic motivations are more tangible and easy to see, therefore I would argue that a good extrinsic reward system would lead online communities to a successful path more than enhancing intrinsic motivations.

Moreover, Wikipedia is broad, and is absent of strict rules about its editing policies. I appreciate that Wikipedia is more lenient about the policies compared to a lot of other online communities such as Geeks Feminism. Otherwise I might feel intimidated by just looking at two hundred pages of rules and policies before I can even get to the point of creating my own articles. I believe the advantage of having less specific policies and rules not only can attract more newcomers that are willing to make contribution but also allow contributors to make mistakes and not be restricted of rules into merely a box. In contrast, an online community has very specific rules written down for many pages so it could still cost complicated problems. For instance, if a person made a mistake that has violated the descriptive norm (rules are not specifically described in the policy pages but it might be a common sense), then he can get away with the mistakes and objectively states that his behavior was not in any violation of rules that was written down specifically for that matter.

During this whole editing process, the emotional connection to the group was created inevitably (affective commitment). In terms of bonds–base, I appreciate that two (Mako and Pine) of the active Wikipedians responded to my page and give me some helpful feedback; As an Asian Americans, I believe that Wikipedia is lacking of articles about Asian Americans organization. I feel obligated to contribute more articles about Asian Americans organization that are notable and this emotion attach fit into the normative commitment category. Often time I was asking myself if I would still commit myself into making Wikipedia articles after this quarter. I would say the answer is a yes.