User:Brynlangrock/Report

I had an overall positive experience with editing my first Wikipedia article. In choosing an article, I referenced the list of stub articles, and navigated to the sports section, which is my biggest interest. I then found a stub page on the 1976-77 Syracuse Orangemen, and I chose that article because I wanted to learn more about that team in researching to add to the article. At first, researching this topic was very difficult. There are very few reputable sources about this season, and because sports reporting and journaling was a lot less thorough in the 70's, there is limited information about teams beyond just scores and schedules. In addition, it’s difficult to summarize a sports season without injecting your own opinion on its implications or its importance to the sports team as a whole. For example, based on my prior knowledge of Jim Boheim, my initial instinct was to comment on how the success of this season was crucial to starting his hall of fame coaching career, because the team took such a chance hiring him in the first place. However, that wouldn’t be based on fact, and would rely on my own interpretation, and therefore I had to stray away from commentary such as that. After continuing to search through various Syracuse archives, I found enough details about the season to create an article that went beyond the numbered success of the team. In completing this article I learned that Wikipedia articles require a lot more work than I originally thought necessary, and it is actually very difficult to build a page that doesn't rely on your own opinion or interpretations of facts, but instead on entirely reputable sources and supported facts.

My first piece of advice to Wikipedia would be to make the idea of contributing to the site as a newcomer less daunting, by providing tools to complete small goals that build upon each other to eventually complete an article, similar to that of what we used as a class with Wiki Education. Wikipedia could make completing this short training a requirement for having a Wikipedia account, which would give newcomers an immediate sense of purpose and belonging to the site. This advice comes from the need for socialization of newcomers to online communities. Without instruction or proper integration to the community, new Wikipedia members may not be likely to contribute, because the norms and process of editing on Wikipedia can be intimidating. By helping newcomers that likely do want to help contribute, but have a lack of a known role in the community, and don't have any direction in contributing, Wikipedia could increase the amount of users that actively contribute to the community. Wikipedia may benefit from a sequential socialization strategy, guiding new users through a series of easily attainable steps upon joining, that culminate in a meaningful contribution to an article. They could use training similar to that of the Wiki Education pages, to guide new users right off the bat after joining, which would help newcomers integrate into the community, and would help in user retention.

My second piece of advice for Wikipedia would be to focus on increasing motivation to contribute in editing Wikipedia pages. Kraut et. al provides three major ways regarding motivation to increase participation in an online community, the first of which being persuasive techniques. A persuasive technique Wikipedia could use to increase participation would be to dismantle the process of building upon a stub page into small, easily accomplishable tasks, that would easily merge with other user's efforts to improve stub pages. For example, on any given stub page, users could be encouraged to complete the small task of finding 2-3 new reputable sources. Once that was completed, another user could assign themselves the small task of expanding the lead paragraph by 3 sentences, using the added sources. These tasks could build upon each other until eventually, the stub page would be improved in each area. This approach makes it easy for users to find something to do, without being deterred by the large task of improving an entire article.