User:AveryMcC/report

At the beginning of this course, I had no idea of the extensiveness of Wikipedia; or that it was considered an online community. That word was never something I fully understood or knew how to look for and I definitely feel like that has changed. I also now recognize how rare it is for an online community to be successful and how impressive Wikipedia really is. After creating my account on Wikipedia, I was able to check out some of the features and try to understand the layout of the site and the different roles you can play as someone interacting with the site. I had trouble navigating in the beginning because I felt a little overwhelmed by the possibilities and routes you could take. There is definitely a lot to see and a lot of options when you are on your home page. I think Wikipedia should maybe create broader categories and place more hyperlinks within those versus have all of those to look through before deciding what you want to do. In order to increase intrinsic motivation in users, I think the Wikimedia foundation should create more incentives for adding beneficial content to different articles and subs. They could do this by advertising more about donating to the foundation and making people understand exactly how they are helping and what their money will do for them in the future. For example, advertising that a donation will contribute to a larger web of knowledge isn’t very sexy or appealing. Advertise how their donation funds an investment in themselves and in others’ lives who have the means to provide their own knowledge and skills to something much bigger than themselves. What I once saw as a research tool I now see as a place where people of all backgrounds can share what they know best. It isn’t limited to people with formal educations or PHDs, it is for anyone who can successfully speak to a field that isn’t very known for the most part. The kind of knowledge that isn’t taught but is experienced.

My experience thus far on Wikipedia has been updating a stub page. To do this, I checked out a bunch of categories that had articles needing a little TLC and chose one that I felt like I had some knowledge on and that I wanted to learn more about. Once I decided on one, I checked out what was already provided and figured out what I wanted to add, delete, and change. I made sure the existing references were legit and if all the claims had evidence that could back them up. In researching and continuously updating, I learned the basics of how to make edits and how to keep track of those edits. I learned how you interact with other users and the extent to which you can provide feedback. I did this mostly through peer reviewing my classmates’ articles and attempting to provide constructive feedback to them. I learned these things through exploring my sandbox, talk page, and the community guidelines of the Wikipedia community.

As someone who has been learning about online communities and actually interacting with them in order to provide feedback, I believe my advice holds more weight than someone who is a new user to Wikipedia and trying to figure out how to navigate it for the first time. The case studies that I participate in twice a week have given me some helpful context for how to evaluate a good online community. When thinking about the many concepts we have learned in this class, my mind always goes back to the broad idea of the types of commitments you can have to an online community. It is different for every user, but I believe many users have normative commitment to Wikipedia. People want to share what they know and what they are good at, and people that are editing and creating on Wikipedia probably feel obligated to do so simply because they have the ability. I also feel that Wikipedia has pretty clear norms established, and they are well followed by most who are collaborating with the site. They are categorized very well and layed out in a way that makes them easy to follow. I can make this assumption based on the fact that I have explored multiple online communities that do not have clear norms established and it is evident when seeing users interact. In learning about injunctive norms, I realize that they are present in different ways all over Wikipedia. The fact that Wikipedia has the ability to tell if claims are not well supported or not sourced well is really cool and shows that people will be held accountable when they don’t properly cite. It also shows people who just use the site for random fact checking, that they may want to double check something before believing what they are reading. Users are also able to highlight both good and bad behavior which not only is a great skill but shows that nobody is perfect and there are positives and negatives to contributing in any way to an online community.

Overall, I know that I have so much more to learn about Wikipedia and about online communities as a whole. Knowing how to navigate them, what to look for, what to avoid, and all the different ways to interact is something that I think will help me a lot in the future. Our society is ever changing, but it is very clearly becoming more online and will probably continue to increase in this way. The past 7 weeks in this class have prepared me for that and have given me an advantage to many people who have not attempted to understand online communities, and that feels pretty dang good.