User:Chuma45/Report

Newcomer experience
Going into this project, I was very unfamiliar with the logistics behind online communities. I have been a part of online communities for many years as a lurker, contributor and even as an administrator/creator. But prior to this course and experience of editing on Wikipedia, I had never paid much attention to the rules and planning behind creating and maintaining a thriving, long-lasting community. In the process of choosing an article to contribute on, I got to analyze the grading system used on Wikipedia articles. Personally, I thought it was incredibly useful that all articles were labeled by both quality and level importance to the Wiki Project it belongs in. My article, 2019 SEC Championship Game, is within the scope of the Wiki Project College Football which has it categorized as a stub of low-importance. Once I had my article picked, I explored the Wiki Project's page and found a list of featured articles and was able to compare a well written 2005 ACC Championship Game article where I pulled several organizational approaches from to use in my article. For a newcomer like me, being immediately exposed to a high quality content was both helpful in getting a better idea of what exactly I wanted to do, but most importantly, it showed me that if I really wanted to, I could follow the steps of these featured editors and have my work be recognized in the featured list someday. Featured content fosters descriptive norms which as discussed in class can be useful for newcomers like me who may not know much about a community, but can become knowledgeable in the community’s norms and rules by being exposed to content that is praised by the entire community. In connection to accessibility to sandboxes, featured content can prove useful in countless online communities where newcomers can draft contributions they wish to make with good intentions.

Contributions summary
My contributions to Wikipedia consisted of adding nearly eight-thousand characters, fourteen references and one image. Before my contributions, the article lacked some key detail and had organizational issues which I helped solve by separating content and incorporating several different headings and subheadings. The article’s content had a lot of gaps on the significance of the game itself. Many of my contributions required me to research a lot about the events leading up to the game and the events that took place after the game. I touched on these throughout the article in sections I added such as the ‘Previous season’ section, the ‘Teams’ section and the ‘Post-game significance’ of my article. These sections allowed me to represent the historical context of this game which will be remembered not the events on the field but how it was a key aspect of Louisiana State University’s historical undefeated season. As to the peer reviews, I looked both the article by Grizzbuzz, GLOBAL (cutlery), and the article by SyNick on Eisenhower High School (Yakima, Washington). Both of the articles were really well written and my only two comments for improvement of both articles were regarding images. The SyNick article incorporated an entirely new section about the new building of the high school and some of the issues regarding the construction. I suggested that he incorporated an image of the old building to give readers an idea of what the circumstances were before and after construction. For Grizzbuzz’s article, I simply suggested that he moved his first image away from his lead so that the info box is better displayed at the top of the article. In the critiques for my article, I received one which was regarding the quantity of content. At this point, I had added to my article only a limited amount of work due to a flu but was able to catch up and incorporate over four new paragraphs to my article since then.

Assignment Reflection
This assignment has not been very similar to any past assignments or projects that I have done. As current recruitment chair in my fraternity, the understanding of how different methods of recruitment, selection, protection, socialization and retention function has been very useful. Wikipedia’s use of these methods may be significantly different from a community not online but the experience of going through the process of becoming a contributor was interesting to compare and contrast with other online communities and the community I’m working to sustain in my fraternity.

Suggestion to the Wikipedia Community
After completing my edits in the 2019 SEC Championship Game Wikipedia article, I have only one strong suggestion for the wiki-foundation and the Wikipedia community. I believe that Wikipedia could benefit greatly from establishing a stronger progressive access control system much like that of Stack Exchange. This would require all users to have a registered and verified account. Each account would then work their way up a table of privileges in connection with a modified version of Wikipedia's current article protection system that would be implemented to cover many more articles than it does now. Privileges can increase as a member of the community increases their credibility through good and improving contributions. Currently, there is not much stopping trolls from entering fake information into most articles in Wikipedia. Wikipedia holds a system of protection categories that can be added to certain articles, such as Donald Trump’s article which is protected by “Extended Confirmed Protection”. This specific protection only allows users with 30 day tenure and 500 contributions to edit. Unfortunately, these protections do not cover most articles including some with crucial information such as health articles. The “Western African Ebola virus epidemic” article has no protection except that it has been labeled as a “good article”. The “good article” tag is a simple template which can be added to an article through a nomination and review process but it does not protect the article from poor editing. Increasing privileges as extrinsic rewards would be incredible at not only raising the content quality but significantly discouraging the number of users who wrongfully damage articles with zero consequences.