User:Brontosh/Report

Wikipedia Reflection Essay

Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia curated and cultivated by volunteers. This concept of freedom from the site being run by people with all sorts of backgrounds and qualifications is appealing to those with an itch for creating, but disheartening for people with strong opinions. In my experience, this freedom has been mostly used for good and gives people a chance to speak on topics they have spent considerable time researching, given that they actually provide reliable sources. However, with freedom comes the natural occurrence of mistakes and unknowns that need navigating. I believe that Wikipedia should consider including a training module when new users sign up to make an account and also prioritizing a rewards and community-based atmosphere to help increase the retention rate of users. Additionally, although the class training modules were helpful I would have appreciated a slightly more in depth explanation of how to enhance an article.

Personally, I enjoyed being able to contribute to an article on photo referencing, which is a technique in the art world that I have practiced for a while. Once I chose which article I would be working on improving for several weeks during my class, I quickly became overwhelmed with a lack of knowledge as to how to navigate the site. This is why I am submitting a suggestion for Wikipedia to include a short training module for new users. For example, a barrier to entry for becoming a Wikipedia editor could be performing simple tasks navigating the website in order to prove that the user is comfortable with and capable of contributing. Robert E. Kraut in his book Building Successful Online Communities when discussing barriers to entry explains how “...online community designers should not instigate these types of initiations unless there is a surplus of prospective members or the increased quality in membership is important”(p.206). Since Wikipedia cares about the quality and reliability of its information posted, I believe that a system of initiation or entry to be able to edit is necessary. Thankfully, my class relied heavily on our personal class wikiedu page where multiple training modules were taken advantage of. If I were to put myself in the shoes of a completely new user who wasn’t privy to these modules, I would surely become someone who may have acted in good faith but made mistakes along the way. My experience adding to a Wikipedia article proves the concept of an uninformed user posing a threat to the community. When I first created my account, I wanted to explore the process of editing an article by myself. As I attempted to edit a subtitle of a random article and had all intentions of putting the subtitle back in place, I quickly became lost when looking at the left side of my edit screen because of the many numbers and symbols that were making up the draft. I eventually had to ask my friend for help and we were able to learn some of the specifics needed to format the articles correctly. Experiences like mine are why I believe that a short but mandatory barrier for entry of completing simple tasks would improve Wikipedia and the user’s experience.

Based on my knowledge from this course, I have recognized the importance of maintaining the retention rates of regular users in facilitating a healthy community-based atmosphere. People respond well to spaces where making online connections is on the forefront of creators minds, leading to a commitment crisis. Where there are reasons to commit to a space, that space is inevitably going to improve because those people are now able to encourage and work together on projects they build passion for. If you were to look at Yelp for example, the community is thriving because users have an incentive to keep their ratings up as trustworthy reviewers and users are even forming bonds with each other. Compared to Yelp and speaking from my experience, I found a lack of community or belonging when participating in improving the article I chose. My incentive to keep adding to the article I chose was really just my love for art. Any further thoughts of contributing to other articles didn’t cross my mind because there was no cost I saw that would arise if I stopped contributing to the website. Therefore I believe that Wikipedia should set up a rewards system for contributing to the articles that need additional information. This is structured on the need-based commitment idea that our course studied. My proposed example of how to make leaving Wikipedia “costly” to a user is to introduce a system that would rate that user’s profile as lower ranked on a scale of trustworthiness if they had not contributed to another article in more than a month. This would show the audience reading those articles that the information they are taking in might not be very credible since the user only contributed to one page. The incentive for the new user to keep engaging with the website is to keep their trustworthy rate high, and the way to do this would be to make sure that they update at least one other article per month. This may seem tedious, but in fact I believe that this system would ensure the reliability and consistency of the users’ contributions because they wouldn’t want their time and energy to be wasted from a reader seeing their additions as invalid because of their user rating.

When thinking about what to possibly change or add to the class format, I would suggest a more personal explanation of how to enhance the article we chose. I felt overwhelmed when deciding which article to improve and felt similar feelings when tackling the editing process of what kind of information to add and how to do so in an aesthetically pleasing way. This could happen through adding more practice assignments into the course before we start embarking on improving the article we chose.