User:AyanoTanaka/Report

First of all, it was an both interesting and challenging opportunity for me to help improving a Wikipedia article because it was my first time doing it and the getting to know the norms of Wikipedia part was little bit difficult and sometimes confusing. I have never thought in my life that I would’ve contributed to the Wikipedia. If I haven’t taken this class, I would not have a chance to be a part of Wikipedia community. However, the concepts that I have learned in this class made me think that I was actually a part of a community for a long time though I didn’t feel like it. More specifically, I was a part of “the free-rider problem.” I often visit Wikipedia page as resources and learn from them, but never helped developing the articles. I was just taking benefits from what others have provided. Before I learned about Wikipedia, on the one hand, I was really impressed how much information each Wikipedia article had, on the other hand, I was always wondering how much the information was accurate. Some teachers from my junior high or high school said that we were not supposed to use Wikipedia as my resource because they didn’t have correct information. However, after I experienced editing an article, I do believe that majority of articles have great content that provided by many people from Wikipedia community, also all tools on Wikipedia (talk page, view history, sandbox, and so on) are helping people to interact with other people who are trying to make the page better. It requires a lot of work and effort to gather all information and put them together. People often edit articles have great motivation and different type of commitment to do so. I have also learned, however, there are both type of people who violate the norm without intention and people who simply have bad behaviors. There are not clear solutions or at least I cannot think of any perfect solutions for this problem. Moreover, I believe every single online community is facing this issue because welcoming newcomers are important in order to grow the community but then it is hard to control behaviors of all newcomers perfectly.

As I mentioned before that editing a Wikipedia article was a little bit challenging. Since my article was a stub article and no one was trying to edit it at that moment, I worked on the article by myself which make things simple and easy. Sandbox, talk page, and view history are of course important tools to interact with other people who are also working on the same article with you, but I assumes that it would be even harder to editing an article together with others because I am new to this system and it might be still difficult for me to check what others are doing and not destroy their work accidentally. While I was the only one who was editing the article, what I did to my article was adding more overall information, historical background and pictures about the topic by reading many different resources. Citing my resources and link to other Wikipedia articles wasn’t complicated process. But finding good resources for my topic took time because I needed to make sure that the resources have much reliability. As a part of the online community, I have a responsibility to publish something really accurate and something that people can use it as a good resource. What something really helped me was that the topic I chose was a festival that is held in my home city annually and I have attended before. That way, I can read some papers and decide whether the information is legitimate or not based on my own experience. However, I tried not to be biased since the Wikipedia articles content need to be neutral. The balance of research and your own experience or knowledge will be a key to create a neutral article.

To be honest, I contributed to Wikipedia because it was a part of assignment, but if it was not, I am not sure I would actually join the community and help making articles better. While Wikipedia is well known and really familiar online community because whenever we search a thing, their articles come up almost always top of the result of any search engines, my biggest concern is how to make people want to contribute to the Wiki article not just reading could be the hardest part. If there is a benefit for people who actually improve articles could give them motivation. People who read Wikipedia articles do not know who create the page and gather all information. For example, making a list that shows who are the people making articles better could be one way to give them benefit. Another example could be gaming motivation. Give each person points that is based on their performance on the community, label the rank, and decide what they can do when they reach a particular rank. Since Wikipedia already made their community is free to join which is definitely helping to build a critical mass. Getting newcomers would not be the biggest problem but keeping them could be challenging. I personally thought that the norms in the Wikipedia community are complicated for newcomers and it could be violated easily by newcomers just because they don’t know the norms. Even though Wikipedia is easy to join by just creating an account, the norms seems complicated and people might decide to leave the community. While Wikipedia has clear norms, how they tell newcomers those norms is a key. When newcomers try something new, the norms should be pop up on their screens as a reminder. This makes newcomers feel confident and easier to contribute instead of worrying that they need to learn lots of norms by themselves.