User:Graceyi11/Report

Wikipedia Reflection Essay

Personally, my experience in Wikipedia has been quite a rollercoaster. It has been very difficult to learn and to adjust to using this new platform that I have never used before. At first, it was very overwhelming because there were a lot of norms and policies that we had to learn about and follow in order to be successful in utilizing this platform. At first glance I thought it was interesting to see a whole new side of anyone having the ability to change the articles on Wikipedia. Going through the instructions and examples that walks you through on how to use and edit on Wikipedia, the content was easily digestible. However, when it came to the actual doing part of the assignments it was really difficult to navigate. Through this whole experience of using Wikipedia I was able to learn how to input some of my research into the article and realize that I can actually make a difference on this platform by upgrading these articles. I learned that it got easier to use once you got used to it but every step of the way I had to explore and learn something new. I would always come across a couple issues that would make me search and dig in order to fulfill the requirements of the assignment. Furthermore, I had the ability to connect with other students by communicating through their talk pages or even with my professor.

Here are some actionable advice that I would give to the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation:


 * 1) Create a more interactive community/group for newcomers and those individuals that have been using Wikipedia. I believe that if there were a group forum where individuals such as newcomers or already members can interact with each other would be very helpful and influential. Especially coming from a user experience perspective there may be times where you have questions about the policies or simply about the use of Wikipedia so having a forum or group for members to interact would be helpful. As I mentioned from my personal experience, as a new user it can be very overwhelming even though you were provided guidelines and instructions it was still very difficult. Something that Wikipedia could do would be to encourage and advise newcomers to join the interactive forum/group when beginning to make edits through this platform. This is kind of like the idea of Reddit where new users will be automatically joined into subreddits to keep them engaged and for them to explore further in the different topics of the subreddits.
 * 2) Continue to foster a welcoming environment and provide further help and enforcing of the rules and regulations of using Wikipedia. As I mention this over and over, as a new user Wikipedia may not be the most welcoming platform when it comes to editing and sourcing articles. In relation to creating a more interactive forum or group for newcomers, it's important for users to feel a sense of belonging and attachment to the community to better encourage affective commitment from the users. Through encouraging affective commitment it would help users to be further motivated and be more engaged within this community. Additionally, I believe that with better enforcing the rules and regulations it would help engage and motivate the users to participate and provide structure. A more detailed advice would be to implement the norms and regulations when a first time user attempts to make their edits for an article. My experience was to watch and read through the lectures or the reading through WikiEdu but when the user is actually attempting to use it for the first time it would be nice to have an interactive design reminding the users of what their expectations are when using this platform.
 * 3) Another factor or advice that I would help this online community would be to have moderators that moderate users sandbox drafts so that they could approve it before going live. It would be nice for a moderator to look over their sandbox article before going live such as checking to see if the tone is neutral, citations and sources are correct and credible, no plagiarizing or copyrights. With the use of moderators it provides less stress of the user having to worry about wondering whether or not their draft is good enough to put it as a live article. I believe the use of sandboxes are very beneficial because it protects the user from having the space and flexibility to experiment and add onto the article. However, it would smoothly help with the process of moving the article out of their sandbox to being live if a moderator was able to moderate and check through the draft. To relate this to my personal experience, I thought it was nice and it lowered the stress and pressure of putting my draft as live because we got the approval of our professor or ta.

Something that is unique about Wikipedia that differs from other platforms is that it's the most accessible platform to all. It allows many and all types of people to contribute to these articles which is very unique and adds character to Wikipedia. Due to this reason it opens doors to having many perspectives because it's open to all. As a student that attends and lives on campus at the University of Washington it has motivated me to add more information and edit the article about the housing at University of Washington because it was a topic that I was interested in and felt like I had more knowledge about this content. It has been a challenging experience but definitely an experience where I was able to learn and expand my perspective. I was able to experience the user experience but also utilize the theories and principles learning in class about the online platform in all different aspects such as the perspective of Wikipedia the company, the users, and just members/readers of this platform.

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