User:Briana Caffee/Reflections

Like a fish out of water, writing a Wikipedia article was a foreign experience to me. While I had used Wikipedia in the past for research purposes, I never thought I would be writing my very own article. In creating my article on volleyball drills, I was able to gain insight into the online community of Wikipedia.

While Wikipedia did not recruit me to join its online community, I was extrinsically motivated to join because I had to do this assignment for this class. I was also motivated to join because there were low barriers to entry. All I had to do was make an account, and there were no qualifications or hoops I had to jump through in order to join the Wikipedia community. As a newcomer to Wikipedia, I found my experience to be confusing and frustrating at first because I had no clue where to start, and I was afraid that I would do something wrong. As explained in Building Successful Online Communities, because newcomers lacked experience, when they tried to participate, they ruined the work of the community (Kraut, 180). This is exactly how I felt until I learned about the sandbox. The sandbox allowed me to write and play around with my article before making it live. This lowered my anxiety because if I made mistakes, no one would see them. As a newcomer to Wikipedia, I believe the sandbox is an important element that every online community should have because it protects new users through creating a safe learning environment and fostering experimentation. After playing in my sandbox and then making my article live, I was still struggling with remembering all the rules of Wikipedia because there were so many. For example, when I first began writing my article, the format of my article was wrong and I struggled with properly citing my sources. It wasn’t until later when I received feedback from Professor Mako that I learned there were various Wikipedia reference pages on how to format articles and citations. Having references and examples on the rules of Wikipedia gave me confidence as I was editing my article. As explained in lecture, norms and regulations are important for online communities because they create structure. Without them, online communities would become ineffective and cause its members to leave. Wikipedia’s rules create a culture of neutrality, good faith, and, notability (Lecture: Norms and Regulation 1).

While there were many concepts and theories that did apply to this assignment, I found that affective commitment and needs based commitment did not apply to me in working on this assignment. In terms of affective commitment, I did not feel an emotional connection to the Wikipedia community or feel an identity based connection to the community. This is because I am still very new to the community and I was only motivated to join the Wikipedia community because of this class. Because I did not build an emotional connection with the Wikipedia community, I do not feel it would be costly for me to leave this community. After this this quarter is over, I will more than likely not keep up with editing my Wikipedia article because I will no longer have the extrinsic motivation to the edit the page. Not to mention, because there were low barriers to entry, that is even less reason for me to feel attached to the Wikipedia community. Even though I may no longer be involved with Wikipedia after the conclusion of this class, I do have suggestions for future opportunities with this assignment.

Based on my experience with this assignment, I think it would be helpful to provide the class with links to the various Wikipedia reference pages before students even begin working in their sandboxes. This would have been helpful for me because then I would have known how to format a Wikipedia article and references before I made my article live, which could cut down on confusion.

Overall, my experience writing and editing an article in Wikipedia gave me an insider point of view of how Wikipedia worked. While the rules and regulations of this online community seemed quite daunting at first, I came to realize that it was not as difficult as I had thought. In the end, this was an insightful and rewarding experience.