User:Ashleyglim/Report

While taking Com 431 with professor Mako, I have been able to become familiar with the community of Wikipedia and learn about its mass, online community. From my first experiences with Wikipedia and starting up an account, I found it very overwhelming and constantly became lost in the amount of links and tabs there were to keep up with. Being a new user was intimidating as Wikipeidia’s online platform was hard to navigate around and I would constantly go back and forth between tutorial after tutorial trying to write up “Hello” on my classmate’s talk page. As I got more fluent with Wikipedia, I realized that the community that resides within creates this feeling of confidence and allowed me to thrive while writing ym sandbox draft and officially publishing my article, The Hello Kitty Murder, as well as making it live for all people to see. What I admired about Wiki was the huge selection of topics that you can personally pick to work on; I was able to choose a topic that I was interested in, and get genuine, helpful feedback from people who were interested in that topic as well. This also made me feel a sense of community and understand the concept of Wikipedia as well. From this, I’d like to give feedback from a user that got first hand experience that started with creating a username, to making an article live.

Being a newcomer to Wikipedia myself, I feel that Wikipedia is too complex and may be too overwhelming for newcomers to continue to grow into this platform. For myself, I had to continue to contribute to this community whether I liked it or not because it was for a class I am enrolled in, but for others who may want to join a community, it is too complex and difficult without the help of TAs and set instructions from a professional, set up class like how I was offered. Since most contributions to Wikipedia are through intrinsic motivation, newcomers may feel that learning all the steps and terminology such as “sandbox” and “User Talk Page” is worth it. As mentioned in the lecture, “Intrinsic Interest Frequently Drives Participation” because ““Fun” is the top cited reason for participation in surveys of many communities”. With this, a solution I would offer is having interactive tutorials right when a newcomer makes an account, and letting them choose a topic of their interest for the tutorial. For example, if the new user loves sports and is taking a tutorial on how to edit an existing article, they can choose a topic related to sports and use it in the tutorial as well. This would include a visual representation of each task and term, because I also had a difficult time even when I had a written tutorial to follow along to. This can be a way that welcomes newcomers into the community and also intrinsically motivates them to continue contributing to this community.

Going back to lecture, the concept of socialization can also be difficult for new users as some may have a little sense of their role, low sense of self-efficacy, and lack social acceptance as well. As a new user myself, I constantly felt that what I was writing was not enough and that I wasn’t experienced enough to contribute to Wikipedia. A solution that helped me was my classmates and TA’s guiding me along each step of the way, giving me friendly, constructive feedback whenever I was in need of assistance. For newcomers, advertising “Teahouse” which is “a populated, user-friendly welcome center/help space that organizes experienced editors to actively reach out to new users in a many-to-many setting and provides on-wiki encouragement and peer support to promising new editors to promote increased engagement and retention” is a great solution in welcoming newcomers. Having experienced users (who were once in a position where the newcomers are) guide and help the newcomers is an efficient way to attract new users. This can also tackle the “Principles for dealing with Newcomers” for 1) recruitment - how to effectively advertise for new members, and 2) selection - how to get the right people to self-select or how to screen new users. The experienced users can be the ones to direct the new users to where they personally enjoy and want to be within Wikipedia and the new users can learn to adapt into Wiki based off of the experienced users as well.

Wikipedia is an amazing place when thinking of the aspect of community. Anyone can be involved and participate in different areas that they find interesting, and also create bonds from the people who also reside in that specific portion of wikipedia. Unfortunately, the biggest setback for this is spammers and trolls. As we learned in class, the bigger and more open a community is, the more likely there will be negative users (spams and trolls). Because of their intrinsic motivation for desire for fame, sadism, or personal enjoyment, these types of users will try to turn an enjoyable community into an inappropriate one. Going back to lecture, a response to prevent bad behavior is to “Build barriers to participation that limit “bad” behavior without affecting “good” behavior” which involve technical approaches or policy decisions. Although having strict norms may affect the community, the only ones bothered by these norms would be the ones who want to troll or spam. Another solution can be to make the title of “Experienced User” more of a privilege than a title; any user from a newcomer to a casual user can edit and mark articles the same amount as an experienced one. If someone were to want to become an experienced one, that would take motivation and time dedicating to being able to edit whatever they choose. Having a set amount of times edited, and even a “look over '' on what the edits were (to see if the edits were good contributions, not trolls), can be a way to grant the title and privileges of an Experienced User. This way, users who actually want to contribute to this community can dedicate their time as they would without the title/privilege, and trolls would need to go out of their way in order to get this title/ privilege. Hopefully by this solution, trolls and spammers would feel less motivated to make inappropriate edits on this platform.