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Wikipedia Reflection
Wikipedia and I are very alike. We’re both very basic looking, hard to understand, and not entirely welcoming to newcomers. However, unlike Wikipedia, I have a (somewhat) dazzling personality and an obvious lack of encyclopedic knowledge. My meeting with Wikipedia this semester came with a lot of confusion, but also a ton of cyber exploration and learning. I didn’t realize the richness of the community that exists on Wikipedia, the willful interactivity and effort towards a common goal. Our present societal climate and my previous knowledge of online behavior makes online unification seem near impossible. The norms I learned about Wikipedia behavior were a breath of fresh air in comparison to some other communities I’ve encountered online. I wasn’t blind to the confrontational sides of Wikipedia; our class was exposed to just as much nonsense as we were good faith behavior. I think it’s the happy medium of these two aspects of Wikipedia that allows for the richness of community and ultimately, the vast encyclopedia that Wikipedia has become.

Kraut and Resnick (2012) tell us “To be successful, online communities need the people who participate in them to contribute the resources on which the group’s existence is built.”  Wikipedia is the shining example of this, it relies on the efforts of its members to publish and edit articles to keep it afloat. I argue Wikipedia could be even more successful with the introduction of a site-led orientation, not one that will diminish the hierarchy of Seven Ages of Wikipedians, but one that will teach a newcomer the bare basics of the site so that they don’t leave the community before fully enriching themselves in it. And for those who do stick it out and grow beyond the WikiInfant stage of life, the site is an invaluable source of community and learning.

Learning how to use Wikipedia was definitely a challenge. The interface is not friendly and its aesthetic feels stuck in the 2000s. I think I struggled more than others in the class to become comfortable navigating the site; I’m still not exactly sure why that is. When it came to the source editor, forget about it, I felt useless. Perhaps it was from my lack of HTML knowledge or I just over thought the process of editing an article entirely. The biggest pain point throughout my experience with the site was the lack of a site-provided orientation when first joining Wikipedia, leaving my WikiInfant self floundering for a way to understand how to edit articles, how to behave properly, and how to not stick out like a sore thumb. I probably would have left the community pretty quickly had it not been for my association with Joseph Reagle’s class. This association was the only reason why I was able to experience a comprehensive, guided orientation and receive a walk through of typical Wiki dos and don’ts.

This topic of newcomer retention becomes especially important in my experience and in the discussion of the topic by Kraut and Resnick (2012). They deem retention a problem that must solved in the dealing with online communities. “Both theory and experience suggest that newcomers’ ties to the community are especially fragile. As a result, the community should engage in tactics that keep potentially valuable newcomers around until they can develop more robust ties to the community or learn how the group operates.”  It’s not the nature of Wikipedia to “roll out the red carpet” for a newcomer, but it is the site’s responsibility and in its best interests to make itself easy to understand, to work with, and become a part of. What’s in it for the site to lose potentially valuable contributors and editors by the lack of an easily accessible welcome and how-to guide?

Where I think Wikipedia shines is in its community organization to clean up the site. Before deciding what to write my Wikipedia contribution about, I poured through page after page of stub articles that needed to be built upon and a plethora of suggested edits to make in already established articles. I considered building upon articles ranging from Norse myths to radio stations to diseases. Although I decided upon something entirely non-existent on Wikipedia in the end, I was taken aback by the sheer amount of content that was up for grabs to be edited and expanded upon. This was still during my first couple of weeks in joining Wikipedia, and I was shocked to witness such extensive organization by a site I had always thought to be at the will of whatever editor was present at the time. I had preconceived notions that most of Wikipedia wasn’t trustworthy knowledge and yet here it was, encouraging users to clean up the articles with ready-made suggestions how to help each specific article.

After weeks of indecision I chose to write my contribution on the book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff, a writer and media theorist. I had read the book in a prior class and thought it fit the bill for something that deserved an article. It was a notable book, reviewed by Forbes, The New York Times and NPR among other publications, with a notable author. It filled a gap where it wasn’t linked to on Rushkoff’s article. I didn’t have any connections to the book other than reading it and had a good enough handle on the content to write about it neutrally. I referred to similar articles about non-fiction books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Blood in the Water and When Breath Becomes Air for help in constructing the article.

Writing the article was a lot more difficult than I first expected. Finally moving it to the main space was an accomplishment like none other. More than anything, I’m excited to see if and how much it changes over time. The idea of this collaborative contribution style fascinates me, how one person thinks differently than another and how that plays out in the evolution of articles. I think understanding how others think is an insightful resource. Enriching ourselves in the thought process of others allows us to think of ourselves and our own work with a much more critical lens, which hopefully leads to better written articles! The collaborative nature of Wikipedia is a resource in of itself. Wikipedia offers up a community where we can learn about others which in turn, helps us learn about ourselves. We become more reflective, more self-critical, and as long as we keep the goal of assuming good faith in mind, we have the potential to become better people.