User:Amy YDY/report

As a free online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia has the features of user-created content, quicker, widely read, wider variety of articles. Its unique open-editing model and low cost of joining the community indeed helps it to attract many newcomers. But as it grew for years, the trade-off appears: more editors with less barrier contribute to a wider scope and less biased contents, while it has challenges in academic publishing due to low reliability and majority of non-academic authorship. My first advice involves the integration of featured articles (well-written, neutral, complete, well-researched articles) on Wikipedia with common academic search engines, such as university libraries, Goggle Scholar. Wikipedia need to increase their reliability and publicity for scholarly publication. One action is to tighten the access of featured articles and encourage verification of identity. The current model prevents anonymous users from editing the featured articles once promoted while registered Wikipedia users have no barrier. My advice is protecting featured academic articles from open-editing model. However, without breaking its dynamic nature, Wikipedia can still keep a discussion forum on Talk page as its advantage of post-publication review & correction and anonymous users should register to access the forum participation. It can strength featured articles with identifiable sources and cohesive environment. The idea behind this suggestion relates to a trade-off between openness and value stock of content on Wikipedia. Limiting openness and focusing on the protection of featured articles can increase academic perception on credibility since these articles already have comparable quality in reliability of content. Newcomer rejection due to barrier won’t become a problem because most new editors of Wikipedia will not start with featured articles. Instead, the access control and verification of identity can create an authoritative environment for featured articles, enhancing their academic acceptance. This way can discourage potential norm violations by anonymous users, selecting newcomers with more motivation, and improve register users with a stronger commitment on academic contribution.

My second advice arises from my own experience on WikiEd when I was required to read the policy and guidelines first. Honestly, I felt intimidated about remembering all explicit rules in mind, fear to miss anything I need to know, and tense to start the editing. Its prominently displayed rules caused a negative influence (pressure) on me, as a newcomer in this community. While other backfired consequences include inadvertently violating one of its many guidelines, implying that norm violation is fairly frequently, and conveying wrong descriptive norms about typical behaviors in this online community. Alternatively, Wikipedia can (1) show visibly to users who go looking for them by designing a “Policy & Guidelines Center” widget at the page of editing. Editors can explore the detailed rules and description for each link at any time (e.g. reliable sources, copyright, plagiarism, etc.). People who proactively look for those rules are more likely to have strong commitment to follow these explicit guidelines and exhibit good behavior. It also serves the legitimacy for assertions of norms or possible sanctions of deliberated violation. Or Wikipedia can (2) make rules prominent but only when norm violation is about to happen. For example, Wikipedia has a policy of “No large block quotes”. The system can automatically show this rule in pop-up boxes as a soft reminder if quoting text form is detected in editing. Similarly, automatic caution can be used at the point when users are about to publish gibberish (like messy code), flame words, or spam. Automatic caution like “Are you sure you want to do this?” applies a social approach to prevent bad behavior by effective feedback that assume good faith and allow for face-saving, reducing the number of offenses and increasing compliance. I think either (1) or (2) can convey a descriptive norm that the guidelines are more accessible to follow.

I spent about 18+ hours looking for reliable sources, contributing on content, checking copyediting, and making my article alive. I initiated with excited and expectant feelings on this project since I never edited on online encyclopaedia before and this course can help me to change from a reader to a contributor on the well-known Wikipedia. This exemplified the concept of intrinsic motivation that I was motivated by the fun and inherent satisfaction from confronting challenges. As I worked in-depth, I learned the strict norms of sources on Wikipedia including neutrality, notability, independence, and reliable publishers. I learned how to add images to Wikipedia under CC BY-SA, which is a tricky policy to pay attention. I acquired useful feedbacks from peer-reviews and improved my article with more contents and citation correction (like delete university library link in the reference). During the process, I realized I was engaged in this community with improved sense of normative commitment. The explicit norms and weekly assignments gave me a feeling that I have obligations to the community with a clear goal for this community, which is contributing a workable “alive” article on Wikipedia. The concept of reciprocity is reflected on my experience to increase my normative commitment: The “view history” function demonstrates how Wikipedia shows editors what they have received from the community (the prove of their contributions), which indicates the supportive reciprocity. Wikipedia highlights opportunities to give back when I found I can return favors by clicking “publicly thanks” for others who made post-publication review on my articles. Additionally, Wikipedia applies the approach of individualized socialization to help newcomers to learn. With this approach, newcomers, just like me, learned the guidelines and norms through independent, informal online training. In this course, students chose different topics and contributed in various ways based on their interests and plans. Here the basic idea is to champion individuality in the community and working toward a common, clear goal, which is contributing Wikipedia in positive behaviors.