User:Casey.ha/reflection

Reflection
Joining the ranks of the thousands of editors that maintain the world’s largest online encyclopedia has been quite a fulfilling journey. For the past three months, my classmates and I have been studying the community on Wikipedia by joining and creating new articles on the site. Now that my own original contribution to the encyclopedia has been drafted, submitted, and published and I have engaged with the community at large, I feel like a true, if not novice, Wikipedian.

In this essay I reflect on what the path from Wikipedia user to Wikipedia editor has been like, analyzing my own experience in the terms of online community design and our classwork. In addition to my own observations and thoughts, the primary source for this essay is the book “Building Successful Online Communities” by Robert E. Kraut and Paul Resnick.

While my experience on Wikipedia was completely positive, there is room for improvement on the site and within its community of editors. The areas where Wikipedia could improve are: welcoming and training newcomers, keeping users motivated, and, relatedly, fostering more commitment from users to the site.

My Experience
In my time on Wikipedia, the first challenge I faced was picking a topic – because the encyclopedia is so expansive, I felt a bit like all the possible topics already existed!

After searching Wikipedia for a few highly specific topics – a local landmark, a comedian, a writer – I realized that a lot of the subjects I might be interested in were largely covered. This searching period had an interesting effect on my sense of a ‘first impression’ of the community on Wikipedia. The topics that I initially searched for felt like things that were close or important to me, and seeing them already covered by strangers in the encyclopedia revealed that the community of editors on the site already included people interested in similar things to myself. Though finding a topic was a small part of my experience on Wikipedia, it was a good early experience and made me feel confident that other community members would share an interest in whatever topic I chose. This feeling amounted to some feelings of bonds-based and identity-based commitment to the community from the onset.

I then thought I would write about a Northeastern professor and filmmaker, someone who I had for class this semester, but after learning about WP:NPOV and WP:COI, I realized I needed to select someone else that I did not have any relationship with to avoid any accusations of bias. I decided to persist with documentary filmmakers and found a list of female documentarians; I selected someone who was notable and not already the topic of a Wikipedia article.

From the list of female documentarians, whose specific source I cannot recall, I selected Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, because I was able to find a large amount of informational sources for her, because I was able to find a large amount of informational sources for her, including an especially comprehensive biography from the Boston University School of Theology Boston Korea Diaspora Project. Born in North Korea in 1938, Kim-Gibson grew up during the era of World War II and the Korean War. She is a highly accomplished scholar and an independent documentary filmmaker whose work deals with issues of social justice, human rights, and diaspora. Though I discovered Kim-Gibson in the simple pursuit of a suitable article topic, it was immensely interesting and gratifying to study her work and to create her Wikipedia biography.

After deciding on a topic, I found the rest of the Wikipedia journey to be actually quite simple and easy to complete. I was able to find a large amount of information on Dai Sil Kim Gibson and thus it was not difficult to write a short biography for her. In addition to her biography, the Wikipedia entry for Kim-Gibson also includes her filmography and the honors she has received for her work. I believe that my experience with Wikipedia was very successful because I selected a topic that was well-documented and I began the process with good research.

When I finished my draft article, I submitted it for approval and was dismayed to learn that articles can take two to three months to be approved. As a newcomer to the site, I found that timeline dismaying. Had I not been submitting my article as part of a class, I might have given up at that point. This seems, anecdotally, like an area of the Wikipedia article entry process that might be a fall-off point for users, who lose the motivation to post when the pay-off of publication is delayed.

I did some research on suggested methods and best practices to get a submitted article approved faster and ultimately found the most success by posting my article in the Teahouse. One of the few interactions I had with other Wikipedia users, and the most affirming, came from this experience when an editor member of the Teahouse told me my draft was one of the best they’d seen in a long time.

While I was pleased to hear that praise, I also found myself not surprised by it. Many of the drafts that I saw in places like the Teahouse where I and other users posted our new articles seeking approval were, simply, of very poor quality. By this I mean they were not noteworthy in topic or subject, not well-written or well-researched, and many were incomplete in terms of references and structure. Some of these posts were clearly self-promotional. These articles would not have been acceptable submissions for our Wikipedia class, and it led me to think about the value of our Wikipedia-oriented class as an ideal way to ultimately grow Wikipedia’s user base and properly acclimate users to best practices on the site.

However smoothly my time on Wikipedia went, it was not difficult to identify potential areas of improvement that could make the site a stronger community. These areas for improvement are explored below in three categories: newcomers, motivation, and commitment.

Newcomers
Wikipedia is used widely as a resource. It is used less broadly as a community that users join and contribute to. While there are 35 million users of Wikipedia, on English Wikipedia there are only 130,000 editors. This represents a great disparity between the number of people using the site for information and the number of people working on the site. Despite this anyone can edit the site and it is easy, fast, and free to create an anonymous account.

As participants in WikiEdu my classmates and I were given access to a learning dashboard where we and our instructor could see each other’s progress. The training required with setting up a WikiEdu account included two quizzes to be completed about Wikipedia. It struck me as counterintuitive to have student editors who are already enrolled in a Wikipedia oriented class receive more preparation for editing than an unaffiliated user. While we learned about the ethics, standards, and norms of Wikipedia from an experienced editor and scholar on the subject in class, and then received the WikiEdu information, users who are not enrolled in an education program are given straight access to the site. To better prepare newcomers to do high-quality work on the site, the WikiEdu training quizzes should be applied to all users.

Additionally, the user interface on Wikipedia could certainly be tweaked to create a more welcoming display to new users. The editing syntax used on Wikipedia may present an overwhelming challenge to new users. For this reason, I would suggest that Wikipedia default to its rich-text visual editor that is more hospitable and familiar to editors who may not have experience with text coding for the web. The visual editor is quite easy to use, clearly understandable, and similar to familiar user products like Microsoft Word. By eliminating this aesthetic barrier that may be off-putting or intimidating to newcomers, Wikipedia could attract more editors from a wider array of backgrounds and comfort levels with technology.

I personally didn’t have much issue with the complicated Wikipedia syntax, but I did prefer to use the visual editor generally speaking. I suspect that working with the syntax needed for my selected article would be much more challenging outside of the classroom context, where we had our instructor to introduce and explain the syntax to us in person.

Some other things that should be simple and clear turned out to be more opaque and technically confusing, requiring more research and troubleshooting, than I would have liked. For example, replying or directing a message to another user was something that I found myself going out of my way to look up how to do virtually every time I needed to send a message. Anecdotally, it seems almost every other site that allows for the same method of tagging of a user to message them uses the “@” symbol. A more intuitive user experience on Wikipedia could be achieved by adopting that familiar functionality. The ability of users to tag and chat with each other is an important part of fostering discussion in an online community. Increasing or facilitating more conversation by making it easier to tag other users would likely increase the bonds-based commitment of users to the site, as discussed later in this essay.

While these suggestions would make Wikipedia more welcoming to newcomers, I do recognize and appreciate the principle that a slightly more challenging user experience essentially functions as a necessary barrier to the community, which may in turn keep ‘trolls’ and non-committed users out. However, I believe that Wikipedia would benefit from continuing to attract new editors to keep the encyclopedia active and fresh into Wikipedia’s second decade.

Motivation
Motivation was not a great concern for me as I worked on my Wikipedia article. Working on Wikipedia as a part of a class meant that my primary motivation to stay active on the site was my doing well in my classwork and ultimately getting a good grade. This is obviously not the case for the average Wikipedia editor, who has reasons and motivations to use the site that are less cut and dry.

There are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from a person’s own goals and desires. Extrinsic motivation comes from rewards or accomplishments given to an endeavor.

While my motivation to work on Wikipedia and get a good grade is an example of extrinsic motivation, it would seem that most Wikipedia editors are largely motivated by intrinsic factors. The reason for that assumption being that there is little reward for doing good work on Wikipedia. Users may be rewarded with praise or feature status given to their contributions, and users sometimes award each other with barnstars and WikiLove. But there is no money to be made by editing Wikipedia, and no acclaim or status outside the site is given to editors. By this observation, Wikipedia should look to harness the intrinsic motivation of its users or increase the potential for extrinsic motivation on the site.

Commitment
While finding the motivation to work on Wikipedia wasn’t an issue during my experience, the chance of me maintaining my commitment to the community is at stake. For Wikipedia, getting users to commit to editing Wikipedia is a pertinent issue.

In Kraut and Resnick, there are several types of commitment outlined, namely: normative-based, identity-based, bonds-based, and needs-based. Normative commitment represents in users a commitment to the mission and goals of the community. On Wikipedia, normative commitment is strongly supported by the clear norms of the community and its aspiration to maintain the encyclopedia is strongly valued.

Identity-based commitment is closely related to normative commitment on Wikipedia. Editors that strongly hold the values of Wikipedia are likely to identify as proud Wikipedians, and they often decorate their user pages with user boxes and barnstars.

Bonds-based commitment, which refers to commitment to a community because of friendships and relationships therein, is minimal on Wikipedia because the primary goal is not social. The Teahouse, a Wikipedia space designed to welcome newcomers, is an attempt to acclimate new users and provide a space for them to talk to other users. My experience with the Teahouse was pleasant, and I had great success there by posting my draft and asking for help getting it to go live, however it was not a space that I used to create any interpersonal bonds that might foster my commitment to the community. Wikipedia is simply not a place where users go for social interactions, and attempts to foster that aspect of commitment to the community such as WikiLove, are interesting, but ultimately don’t seem to fit.

Conclusion
Overall I am pleased to say that my experience using Wikipedia in this context was extremely positive, and in fact I feel confident that I will continue to add and edit articles, or otherwise participate in the Wikipedia community, in the future. Of course, the user experience is not entirely flawless. Wikipedia could make significant strides in on-boarding newcomers, fostering intrinsic motivation to contribute, and strengthening converted users’ sense of commitment. Ultimately, this classroom-based experience not only granted me these interesting insights into ways Wikipedia and its user experience could be improved, but instilled in me a high-level understanding of the ideal Wikipedia workflow and best practices, so that I can continue to be an engaged and productive member of the community.