User:DionnaTaylor/Report

Report
As a result of the internet, online communities were born in order to house our digital personas. As we expand our presence on the internet, we inevitably interact with a vast number of communities, if not become a part of them. Over the last few weeks I have not only been actively engaging with Wikipedia, but I have also studied it in contrast with a variety of other online communities. In order to provide a detailed evaluation of this community, I will first address how my experience with Wikipedia has contributed to why I think it is successful and what type of changes I recommend for the future.

One of the things that I value the most about the Wikipedia community is how intrinsically motivated the community is. For a community so large, I am impressed with how sustainable Wikipedia has managed to become. Wikipedians have built a highly normative community, full of individuals with a desire (or an obligation) to contribute to the greater good (p. 103). The beauty of Wikipedia is that it is a living document that evolves and adapts to the world around it. And it is able to do so because of the hundreds of thousands of people who take the knowledge that they know, or the knowledge that they seek out, and they contribute it to this cause. I would also say that a vast majority of the community is engaged in identity-based commitment. Of which I think plays a large role in why the Wikipedia community is so successful given identity-based commitment tends to be a stronger form of commitment, in comparison to others, and results in community members being more likely to follow the rules and abiding by norms (p. 81).

Oftentimes communities resort to extrinsic rewards in order to recruit and retain newcomers to their communities. However, the tradeoff with this is that extrinsic rewards typically crowd out intrinsic motivation. The crowding out effect refers to the idea that rewarding people for things they were already willing to do for free, results in them enjoying it less when they no longer receive compensation (p. 60). As tempting as the short term benefits of extrinsic rewards seem for online communities, the long term repercussions of it do not result in the same type of commitment we see from intrinsically motivated communities. I think this is important to highlight because something I find uniquely fascinating about Wikipedia is the concept of barnstars. While the barnstar is an extrinsic reward, it seems to be something that can only be achieved through intrinsic motivation given they are awarded by fellow Wikipedians. Although there is a list of general types of barnstars and how to achieve them, there is no guarantee that you will receive one for actively contributing, editing, or resolving conflict. Whether or not a user is granted one is solely at the discretion of other Wikipedians, preventing users from gaming the system in order to collect them. I would almost consider the barnstar as a sort of extrinsic validation, in that it does not result in the same negative effect on commitment the way extrinsic rewards often do.

Although the Wikipedia community continues to be successful, there are a couple of recommendations I would like to pose. The first thing being progressive access control. While the sandbox exists, it is not required for users to use before they start contributing to Wikipedia. By implementing escalating privileges, not only is the damage by newcomers limited, but it also allows users to get a feel for the community, their norms, and the expectations, prior to having free-range access to editing (p. 221). This might look like requiring individuals to post edit ideas on the talk page before they are able to make edits to an article for the first five articles they are interested in contributing to or restricting editing access to particularly popular articles until members have been a part of the Wikipedia community for more than a set number of days. Reddit has a similar policy by requiring users to have had their account for at least thirty days and have accumulated an undisclosed number of karma points prior to being able to start their own subreddit. While progressive access control may deter newcomers, it does at least encourage them to interact with the community and reduces unintentional norm violations by uninformed newcomers.

In comparison to other communities I have studied, Wikipedia appears to be lacking in terms of fostering room for social interaction. While the talk pages allow for Wikipedians to interact with each other, that form of interaction is more formal and catered towards the future direction of the respective Wikipedia page rather than cultivating new connections between members. With a community that primarily functions off of identity-based commitment, it is easy to overlook individuals that would be attracted to Wikipedia if provided the opportunity to develop bonds-based connections. With social contact being one of the primary ways to enhance intrinsic motivation (p. 43), offering a space for individuals to just interact with each other could further expand the Wikipedia community. This space for interaction does not need to be added to Wikipedia itself, it could be a separate forum, like slack or discord, similar to how Open Humans has a slack channel. By supplementing identity-based commitment with a bonds-based form of commitment, commitment may be increased for those who do not feel as much of an obligation towards the community itself.

Overall, I feel as if Wikipedia has mastered the balance between intrinsic and extrinsic rewarding in order to maximize commitment from community members. I believe it would be a mistake to add additional forms of extrinsic motivators given the community already has a stable foundation of intrinsically motivated individuals who enjoy contributing. As a recent newcomer myself, I think escalating privileges could help new users adjust more easily to Wikipedia and would progressively ease them into a new community and their rules and expectations. I also think the improvement of social interaction would help Wikipedia grow in a way that not only results in a community committed to the cause, but to each other as well.