User:BrieShell47/reflection

When I realized that anyone could edit Wikipedia, I was a little overwhelmed. I had gone years thinking that you had to be a certain "somebody," a person who worked for Wikipedia, or a person of authority, in order to edit the famous online encyclopedia pages. I didn't know much about the website other than it came up on the first page of every Google search and my academic teachers forbade me from citing it in my papers. This semester, in my Online Communities class, I had the opportunity to learn about the many aspects of open-source encyclopedia, and I was assigned with the task of creating my first Wikipedia article. To prepare us for composing our first contribution to the community, our professor, Joseph Reagle, taught the class how to use wikicode and make edits, what the basic content guidelines were, what motivates user participation, and what makes Wikipedia a community. In the rest of this article, I will reflect on my experience with creating my first Wikipedia page and explain the essential concepts I learned about Wikipedia as an online community.

On the first few days of class, our professor took ample time introducing us to the basic concepts of Wikipedia. It was wise to bring us newcomers up to speed because according to Robert Kraut, Moira Burke & John Riedl (2010), if the class didn't learn the norms guiding behavior in the community, we may have acted in ways that offended other group members or otherwise undercut the smooth functioning of the group. As new editors, if we had jumped straight into writing articles before learning about the Wikipedia community, we may have failed to follow certain policies or we may have added content deemed insignificant by a consensus of more experienced editors. Professor Reagle understood that in order to be respectful to the Wikipedia community and to protect us newcomers from getting bitten or being told to RTFM, we needed to learn the core concepts before anything else. To get us started, he told us to take an online student orientation to learn how to create an account, make edits in a sandbox, and gain an understanding of the basic pillars of the Wikipedia community. As I went through each step of the orientation, I was overwhelmed by the amount of information newcomers were expected to learn. I didn't think it could be possible to remember every detail of the Wikipedia's 5 Pillars, the guidelines for verifiability and notability, and the large amount of wikicode for things like bolding, linking, and citing sources. At first, I tried to take detailed notes so I could refer back to them when I created my first Wikipedia page but after filling up about five pages of my notebook, I gave up on writing everything down. At this point, I might have given up my plans of making a Wikipedia contribution because of the minor adversity of information overload and my low level of commitment to the community. However, with the help of useful resources our professor provided us with like the Help:Cheatsheet and the Help:Wiki markup, and my extrinsic motivation to receive a good grade in the course, I was able to overcome this entry barrier.

Although I personally wasn't intrinsically motivated to contribute, we learned that Wikipedia is a successful community because of the many users who are motivated in this way. According to Robert Kraut and Paul Resnick (2011), "members of online communities are motivated because either effort toward the task or successful completion of the task is intrinsically rewarding, independent of other downstream consequences of performing the task" (p. 41). Members of Wikipedia are intrinsically motivated by several of Reiss's motives such as power (the desire to influence), curiosity (the desire for knowledge), idealism (the desire to improve society), and order (the desire to organize) (as cited in Kraut and Resnick, 2011, p. 41). In addition to these intrinsic motivators, Kraut and Resnick (2011) add that Wikipedia also drives its users to contribute more and to go on to show organizational citizenship behavior by setting goals (p. 38). These goals are organized into Collaborations of the Week where members are encouraged to work on specific high-priority articles for a defined time period (p. 38). By "coupling goals with specific deadlines," members are motivated to increase contribution as the deadline approaches and some motivational effects of these goals can spill over and cause members to take on more responsibilities (pp 38-39). The goal of Wikipedia is to create "the largest [free] encyclopedia in history, both in terms of breadth and in terms of depth." After learning the community's goal and reviewing the ways in which members are intrinsically motivated to participate, I gained a better understanding of what it meant to be a Wikipedian. After becoming more acclimated to the community culture, our first step was to choose a topic for our first Wikipedia page. In order to do this, we needed to have a grasp of the Wikipedia notability concept. On Wikipedia, notability means whether a topic has "gained sufficiently significant attention by the world at large and over a period of time" as evidenced by significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic. . As we picked our topics, our professor told us to chose with care and warned us that other members of the community might place a tag on our articles, tag us for speedy deletion, mark our page with the { { prod } } tag, nominate us for regular deletion, or straight-up delete our page if they found our topic wasn't notable enough. To help us choose an acceptable topic, the Northeastern University library gave us a list of topics for which there was no article and we were directed to a list of requested articles created by the Wikipedia community. We were also prompted to choose a topic related to our interests, studies, or career if we were confident in our knowledge and ability to find sources and edit without a conflict of interest. Initially, I choose to do my Wikipedia article on my mother, Suzanne Davidson, who was an actress on As the World Turns, How to Survive a Marriage, and Miracle on 34th Street (1973 film). I thought she would be a notable topic because I found her name red linked in a few locations, indicating an article should be created for the topic because the subject is notable and verifiable. However, after learning about Wikipedians' obsession with reliable secondary sources, I realized I couldn't find an acceptable number of quality secondary sources to back up my first-person knowledge. In addition, I was also worried I might run into a conflict of interest due to my family relation. In order to pick a topic that jived better with the Wikipedia community, I decided to drop the topic and pick a new one that I could properly back-up and write about in a neutral point of view. After some brainstorming other topics I was interested in, I decided to write my article about Bromley Mountain, a ski resort I grew up skiing and ski instructing at. To make sure I didn't duplicate a page, I searched Wikipedia to see if a Bromley Mountain page already existed and found a stub for the page with a very limited amount of information. After double checking with my professor, I was given the go-ahead to expand the article in order to remove its stub status.

Before I expanded the stub, it looked like this. As you can see, there were only a few sentences of text that provided some useful information but were too short to provide proper encyclopedic coverage of the subject. This is why the page was flagged as a stub in need of more expansion. Before I started to add information, I made sure to verify the information on the stub was correct and I reviewed the references from the previous Wikipedia user. Then, in order to see what type of information I should add, I looked at some completed New England mountain resort Wikipedia pages like Stratton Mountain Resort, Sunday River (ski resort), and Killington Ski Resort. I took note of the different information each page provided and tried incorporate all the important aspects of each page into my Bromley Mountain page. I liked some of the templates the pages used to organize the information so I went into the edit tab and copied the wikicode to use the same templates on my page. I found it easy to fill in the information and create charts that organized Bromley's trails and chairlifts. Although I know a great deal of first person information about Bromley Mountain because I grew up there, I made sure to use reliable secondary sources to back up every piece of information in my article and to make sure the information I provided was unbiased and accurate. Luckily, unlike some of my classmates, I didn't run into any problems with the Wikipedia community and my page was never flagged, which was especially surprising because I made the bold move of editing the page outside of the sandbox. However, although my page was never reported, when I looked back my page's edit history, it was evident that some Wikipedians helped me with some minor edits throughout the process. For example, one user, Niceguyedc, repaired 1 link to the disambiguation page so the term J-bar went to J-bar lift. Before having an understanding of the Wikipedia community, I would have considered it strange that random users made edits to help to improve my page, especially when they weren't given a paid incentive for doing so. But now that I've learned more about the community, their norms, and motivations, I can understand why Wikipedia users went out of their way to make small fixes to my Bromley Mountain page.

After going through this entire experience, I am proud to say I have a much better understanding of Wikipedia. Recently, when I attended a conference for work, I was even confident enough in my Wikipedia knowledge to stand up in from of a crowd and explain the basics of the community and how to make a contribution. Through practice, I've almost completely broken away from my reliance on Wikipedia cheat sheets and I feel confident in my ability to determine what topics are notable and verifiable. With my future career in digital marketing and content creation, I can see myself potentially using Wikipedia (or the concepts I've learned from it) as a tool. Who knows, I may even find myself intrinsically motivated to create a page for a topic close to me that doesn't yet exist on the largest encyclopedia in history. Brianne Shelley (talk) 02:32, 7 April 2015 (UTC)