User:Cjweik/Report

As a free online encyclopedia that involves voluntary editors around the world, Wikipedia can be regarded as one of the best choices to let students learn and apply concepts about building online communities from the practice of contributing on it. This report is trying to share a newcomer’s feelings about five-week experience on Wikipedia and further provide some advice on improving the community.

The five-week engagement on Wikipedia is actually a newcomer’s experience on an online community. As part of assignments in this course, every action is guided by the professor’s detailed instructions. For newcomers, a mentor, just like the role professor plays here, can effectively lead them to get familiar with the community making less mistakes, which definitely makes the starting process comfortable and smooth. Additionally, going through online student orientation at the very beginning gave me a good chance to get familiar with the background and basic rules of Wikipedia. Besides, our online course group on Wiki Education is exactly a subgroup in an online community where students’ performance is exposed to every group member. There are two main influences brought by this group on my engagement on Wikipedia. On one hand, what other students do previously set me a good example on assignment achieving. For example, when assigning two articles to review, I found I did something wrong since content under my username appeared differently from others’, which pushed to me correct the mistake immediately. That is to say, some leading members in a community are able to lead the rest in a correct way, by which the community grows positively. On the other hand, my passion on contributing to Wikipedia is greatly influenced by the other members in our education group, since the course group main page shows clearly about every member’s performance, like recent edits and character added. When my statistics were obviously lower than others’, I would seek more chances to make contributions on Wikipedia. That implies that competition shown in an indirect way among group members would stimulate them to be more involved by making more contributions. It is worth mentioning that the Recent Edits and Characters Added are based on the past 7-day performance. If not, recent comers’ engagement enthusiasm would be absolutely destroyed, because difference on performance data between old members and recent joiners will be enlarged as time goes by if it is roughly based on the history record. While writing the article, strict and long policy rules on different categories frustrated me not only in topic choosing but also language organization, which makes newcomers feel unconfident to get started. However, peer-review helped me understand the writing rules better, like what the neutral tone should look like.

I do learn a lot from the five-week participation on Wikipedia and have a deep comprehension on how the course concepts apply in real environment. First of all, “Don’t Bite the Newcomer” policy works well in encouraging newcomers to improve their work. “Don’t Bite the Newcomer” policy means treating newcomers with kindness and patience so that they would not be scared away by hostility or elitism. There was an ambassador for our course group leaving message on my talk page to remind me of how to de-orphan an article. The message went in gentle and encouraging tone, which not only recognized my efforts but also pointed out my room to improve the article quality. Secondly, SandBox reduces the harm to the community that newcomers might cause without the help of learning process given by it. For first-time users, chance is high that articles created by them are less qualified to the Wikipedia rules so that leave readers a bad impression about Wikipedia. By reviewing the article in Sandbox, the instructor can give advice on making the article qualified to be published.

Based on my experience, here are primarily four suggestions on making Wikipedia better from personal perspective. To begin with, writing policy training should be supplemented by interactive educational way apart from lengthy statements. Explicit descriptions about writing policy is necessary, but too many words might not only make key information buried in massive information but also lose new joiners’ confidence of making contributions. It is practical to add an informal test, like teaching them to use appropriate tone by making choices between given examples. Detailed examples and informal educational method can enhance users’ understanding about the policy in a comfortable way. Secondly, censorship is considerable to take before publishing an article from the SandBox. Moderation systems that prescreen, degrade, label and other tactics can limit the damage those flawed articles cause. For the first-time user who has not probably got the regulations about writing a Wikipedia article completely, the new-born article is likely to not meet some norms, like notability principle. Only those articles that pass the censorship can be published, otherwise it should be revised according to the feedback from the censor. Thirdly, obvious vandalism should be checked before getting down. I experienced that a newcomer deleted 3500 words of my 4000-word article without any valuable information but several dirty words. Even though this edit was reverted immediately by the ambassador of our education project, it likely hurts the author’s feeling and even affects how readers view the contributors and rules in Wikipedia community if they see the edit history. So obvious unconstructive edits like deleting 70% words of an article without any explanation should be not allowed when editing the article. Additionally, it could work well if new users do not have the power to do big edits, because instituting progressive access controls can effectively reduce the negative effects caused by misbehavior from unexperienced users. Last but not least, reputation system is necessary to encourage good behavior and deter norm violations. When the history of someone's online behavior is summarized on the user page, it can drive the user to make more contributions and also deter him or her from doing wrong to harm the community.