User:Bigbuck stag/Reflections

I never had any real deep experience with Wikipedia before this assignment. I was like the vast majority of people who simply use Wikipedia for information but never contributed in any real way.

After recently completing my first wikipedia article, I have a changed personal view on Wikipedia. I now care about Wikipedia and have admiration for the people that help make it what it is. The idea that anyone around the world can have access to a “living” encyclopedia is truly exciting and now I am apart of it! As we learned in class, there are many small intricate cogs which make Wikipedia run so well. For example there are many Wikipedians out there who rather than focus on writing articles, would like to patrol and critique articles. Less than twenty four hours after I took my article live, I had a notification that another Wikipedian patrolled it. It gave me a first hand experience of one of the little cogs that work behind the scene but are so very important to make sure the content posted is credible. During this assignment I learned more about my topic but I also learned some of the technical side of posting a good article on Wikipedia. In order to do this I was forced to not only try my best to write in a neutral voice (which can surprisingly be very difficult to do). But also use many citations to make my work credible and worth reading. Which I feel like this is one of the most important parts of writing a successful article on Wikipedia because without proper citations, how can anyone know what you are stating is accurate in anyway?

While we have discussed many topics in class, one that really applies to me with my experience with Wikipedia, is from our book Building Successful Online Communities. While Chapter two is all about Encouraging contribution to Online Communities I want to specifically talk about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. To quote the book, “intrinsic motives, in which the performance of some activity is an end in its own right, and extrinsic motives, in which the activity is a means to achieve some other outcome”. I feel like my extrinsic motives changed by the end of the assignment. While my intrinsic reasons remained the same. I wrote an article on Gothmog because I enjoy writing about Lord Of The Rings, but at the start of this assignment my extrinsic motives were to simply get a good grade. But by the end I discovered that I cared about writing a good article not only because of the grade, but mainly because I wanted to share my love of this character with more people. This is a much more powerful extrinsic reason and will keep me coming back to Wikipedia to participate.

It is my opinion that our extrinsic reasons heavily connect to our commitment to online communities and it is extremely important to understand that there are just as many different reasons as their are people. After participating in this assignment I’ve realized that I have a interest to dive into direct extrinsic reasoning, specifically learning what reasons to create to spark people's motivations and improve commitment. What I mean by direct extrinsic reasoning is motivation that is directly connected to the community. An example of this can be found in Wikipedia with the use of badges. By having people writing or critiquing articles in the hunt for more badges, Wikipedia is giving Wikipedians extrinsic motivation directly connected to the community. While my extrinsic motivation for the Gothmog article was indirect, who knows maybe one day I might become a badge hunter myself?

I feel like some concepts we covered that did not apply for this assignment were the ones on internet trolls. While others in the class may have encountered this, I personally never did. This is something I (oddly enough) would possibly change if I were running this assignment. I as the teacher would either make a fake account and do some light trolling on the students or I would encourage the students to troll each other. This could prepare us better for the future chance that we do deal with a real troll. I understand that there are some obvious problems with this experiment. For example if a teacher were to make an account unbenounced to the students and troll them, this could lead to some awkward contact between the two parties. While there are obviously other issues, I still feel like making some sort of troll aspect to the assignment would have been appreciated.

In conclusion, this assignment has once again made me so much more excited to take part in Wikipedia. And I have learned a lot from it and I can't wait to contribute more for my fellow Wikipedians.