User:Grizzbuzz/Report

Greysen Hayvaz

Wikipedia Essay

Overall my Wikipedia experience was very informative and entertaining. I chose a topic I really had a lot of interest in, so it was very easy to stay engaged and continue to work on the article because I felt like I had a sense of Bond commitment to it. When starting out I found the WikiEdu modules very boring and kind of useless in all honesty because most of the modules were material like “Plagiarism” and related topics which are something I have rehearsed again and again and again through the education system so I did not learn anything new, just wasted time reading through a half hour of pages. However, even though it was not useful for me, I can understand how for some people, it would be. After those introductory modules when we actually started using Wikipedia and learning how to do things, WikiEdu was incredibly helpful to a point. Over the course of the project I became more comfortable with the platform and so I tended to resort to just trying to struggle my way through some of the more intricate functions, sometimes failing and then trying again. The only reason I did it this way was because I had use of the sandbox where I knew I wouldn’t break anything that mattered too much. If I only had access to the live article, I don’t think I would have been so bold.

I think the most frustrating part of this whole process was either trying to find pictures on the Commons or trying to originally find the article to work on. Though I eventually figured out both I think finding the article was the more difficult part and this might be one area Wikipedia could change some things to make that process a little better and possibly encourage more active use. First off, I found it difficult to find an article that was both interesting to me and that really needed improvement. Though I was eventually able to do it, it took a couple hours to find a few that were viable. So one thing then Wikipedia could use to improve that is some sort of quiz or test that could get a general idea of the types of topics that a specific user likes and then use that to recommend articles to work on for that user.

I think this would be something that hits one major trouble area for Wikipedia. I think it would increase commitment to the community because this shows that Wikipedia is reaching out and interacting with its users which might raise the sense of commitment for new users as well as some of the less recent users. But really the major market here would be the new users and encouraging them to stick around for longer periods after joining if they can become active and edit something that they have a greater personal interest. In addition a sort of added bonus might be re-motivating old users that have sort of started to drift away by introducing a sense of bonds based commitment for them instead of just relying on the normative commitment that Wikipedia was built around.

I think this is necessary because if my experience is anything like what a normal new user’s is then I can’t imagine why they would want to go back through the process of finding an interesting article in the mountains of stubs and starts listed. If Wikipedia were to be able to streamline that process by recommending articles, that need help or updating, on a user preference basis then that may go a long way towards engaging more users. The theory behind this is very simple, introduce a new kind of commitment for users to latch on to. Admittedly, Wikipedia has surpassed the point where it “needs” to do this, in that they definitely have enough people in the world that are just fine editing based on Normative commitment to Wikipedia and that will suffice for most of the workload. However, there is a lot of work that still needs to be done and if they could entice new users and or fading user who are seeking a new sense of belonging to Wikipedia, then it might just make the downward trend in continual editors turn around.