User:CassieClovis02/Report

Wikipedia report
Wikipedia is a platform that offers many different outlets for its community members to engage with. One thing that makes Wikipedia a unique community is that information is continually created and updated in real time on the platform. Three key factors that Wikipedia has done to become successful and attract contributors include building the platform around a familiar product, offering low barriers to contribution, and having low attribution and social ownership content. The platform itself is diverse and well designed, but can often be intimidating and difficult to navigate for newcomers. Although Wikipedia is good at incentivizing their users to stick around, there is much more that the online community could do to attract newcomers and encourage more participation within the platform.

Until about a month and a half ago, Wikipedia was an untouched platform for me. I had previously used Wikipedia to search things, but had never contributed to any pages within the community. Now, I have experience contributing to pages within Wikipedia and have been reading many articles pertaining to ways in which online communities can be improved. When first beginning to use Wikipedia, the lengthy list of rules and norms was intimidating as a newcomer. Newcomers are often more likely to contribute when tasks are phrased in a way that is straightforward and easy to understand. I think that the Wikimedia Foundation could include more ways for newcomers to learn the rules and regulations such as through informative seminars or monthly refresher courses. Wikipedia does a good job of rewarding their users with internal community status. For example, barnstars within the platform act as a motivator for community members to contribute and continually edit within Wikipedia. A main recommendation to the Wikimedia Foundation and community as a whole would be to increase different kinds of commitment within the platform. For example, identity-based commitment could be increased to encourage users to participate to fulfill the community’s mission. Wikipedia could do this by advertising and broadcasting their mission statement more. Their mission statement is, “To empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.” If more individuals see and understand Wikipedia’s mission statement, more people will be likely to join and contribute their knowledge to achieve a common goal.

Since Wikipedia is an online community that is producing non-rival public goods such as information goods, there is often a free rider problem. This problem occurs since anyone can have access to and gain knowledge from the information on Wikipedia, without actually having to contribute anything themselves. To combat this issue, I recommend to the Wikimedia Foundation and community that Wikipedia should require readers to make a minimum number of edits on a certain amount of articles before being able to view articles freely within the platform. This would also likely require increased moderation as well as software technology enhancements. In my recent experience with Wikipedia, the platform has many types of explicit norms which help regulate user’s behaviors. Some of the norms that I have experienced include singing messages using four tildes, neutrality, and assuming good faith. This use of injunctive norms is good, although I still believe that Wikipedia can decrease the amount of norm violations on the platform by highlighting good and bad behavior as well as offering users a reminder of the norms at a time where norms may have been violated. In addition, I also recommend that the Wikimedia Foundation thinks about including participants when writing up new norms and rules. It has been shown that norm compliance may be higher if participants are involved in writing their own rules.

Wikipedia does require accounts for editing, which is something that helps prevent threats such as spammers and trolls from being active on the platform. In addition, Wikipedia also has a CAPTCHA security check point when creating an account to further weed out spammers. Although Wikipedia does already have moderators on the platform, I think that having even more moderators could decrease norm violations and increase content validity, so I would recommend that the Wikimedia Foundation look into that. If norm violations are still common after this change, the Wikimedia Foundation and community could create different warnings and sanctions for the platform. These can be used to prevent future bad behavior or limit the effects of bad behavior. Graduated sanctions should also be implemented such as account suspension after a certain amount of violations. Since these sanctions may create a cheap pseudonym problem, which is where users create other accounts in the face of negative feedback, the Wikimedia Foundation should consider requiring the use of real identities when creating accounts, or increasing benefits for participating long-term such as special or added barnstars. Attracting the right members to Wikipedia is important. For example, Wikipedia should again consider requiring real identities when joining the community to attract and retain only motivated individuals who will create a positive impact on the platform.

All attempts to decrease norm violations and bad behavior will have some collateral damage, such as an impact on good contributions. For this reason, I recommend that the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t implement all of these changes at once. My experience on Wikipedia so far has been very positive with helpful talk page comments, and a list of clear norms and rules to follow and refer back to when needed. Overall, Wikipedia is a successful online community that can be improved with increased contributions and decreased norm violations by the Wikimedia Foundation making a few useful improvements to the platform.