User:Ellass22/Report

Wikipedia is a large and impactful community that benefits many people around the world. As an international student from China, I did not have access to Wikipedia before studying in the US. However, while living in the US the past three years, it has become one of my most used websites when searching for information, reading about concepts, and learning knowledge. During the process of editing on Wikipedia, I have found some problems within the community, and I will point out my feelings and give recommendations in the following texts. Overall, it was a profound experience for me to have the opportunity to connect with such an influential community and learn about writing and editing on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is unique in the way that it aims to serve the public good instead of making profits. Pulling from my own experience, this makes Wikipedia more trustworthy. I had the experience of editing on Baidu Baike (the Wikipedia in China) when I searched for word entries and saw some minor errors on the websites. But I had no idea of citing sources or what are some good sources I should look for. Compared to Baidu Baike, Wikipedia does a really great job of providing the Wiki Education platform to inform and educate new users the norms and rules of the Wiki community. I followed the training on Wiki Education which was really helpful. For example, it walks you through different functions on the editing page and you can try those functions in your sandbox without actually making any changes in the “real world”.

An issue that I encountered during my experience in Wikipedia is that when it comes to articles related to content from other cultures or countries, they are more incomplete and it is more difficult to find related sources and users to contribute to these incomplete pages. Although there are Wiki Projects relating to specific cultural topics, users tend to contribute less commitments even in the smaller community. The page I chose to update is about a Chinese movie Everybody’s Fine. The actors of the movie are famous in China, and the movie has a high click-through and download rates. On streaming platforms in China, it also has a large number of views. Yet the page about this movie on Wikipedia lacks important information such as the plot. After the first modification of the page, Professor Mako gave me the advice to look over how members of the Wiki Project Film/Chinese cinema task force write and edit pages about Chinese films. However, there are only a few members in this Wiki project. Within a list of 21 people, only a few of them are active users: some of their user pages no longer exist while others have not been contributing in the last one or two years.

The first advice I want to give to the Wikipedia community is that it is important to attract users from different countries to engage in creating and editing content on Wikipedia. Motivation is an important part for people to start engaging and keep engaging in an online community. According to the first week's lecture, people are more willing to do something if the benefits outweigh the costs; this can be both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. One way to improve people’s intrinsic motivation is to make things more fun. Extrinsic motivation focuses on outside forces that make people want to contribute to the community. For example, in the Yelp case we talked in the class, people who write high-quality reviews constantly will be given the status of Yelp Elite. These people are rewarded with gifts, free events, and sparkly badges. The Wikipedia Community can do the same thing to users who edit on the websites constantly and write constructive, neutral, and well-cited content. They can reward these users with a T-shirt with words like “Wiki Elite” or simply send them gifts from the Wiki store. The community can also give these people privileges like putting their usernames in different colors, or adding special emojis behind their username on their user pages. Through this way, the community not only stimulates people to contribute to content posting, but they also give them a sense of belongingness.

Another piece of advice is that the Wikipedia community should think more about how to make their editors more committed to the community. As for myself, I wouldn’t keep on editing articles on Wikipedia unless I accidentally see errors in the articles while using it. There’s no incentive for people to edit Wikipedia. Take the Wiki Project Film/Chinese cinema task force as an example, only a few members in this small community are active, and the website’s “Talk” page hasn’t had any interactions since 2019. The Wikipedia community can increase user’s engagements to the community through identity-based commitments and normative commitments. One can build identity-based commitments to the Wikipedia community when the community offers these users a sense of belongingness. For example, the Wikipedia community can host events in big cities and invite the most active users to the event to increase their community belongingness. Normative commitment is built when people feel like they are not doing the right thing if they are not participating. In this case, the Wiki Project Film/Chinese cinema task force can build normative commitments within this small community through advertising for the idea that it is for the good of Chinese cinema to be known by more people. Through these two methods, users will be more likely to increase their commitments to the community and thus be active and contribute for a longer period of time.

Being an active Wikipedia community member allows me to incorporate the course concepts of motivation, commitments, norms and newcomers in real world examples and personal experiences. As for the lectures on starting an online community part, I would say it’s less relevant to my experience with the Wikipedia community. Overall, the experience of editing on Wikipedia has been interesting and enlightening to me.