User:Hannahmarriiee/Report

Hannah Wheeler

CommLead 570, Building Successful Online Communities

May 14, 2021

Introduction
Wikipedia, while still a robust online community in many ways, has seen a decrease in participation over time. I’ve always been aware that anyone can edit Wikipedia, but never edited an article myself until I joined a class on Building Successful Online Communities. The goal of this class is to gain an understanding of design principles that can be applied to online communities in various ways to make them more successful. The definition of success for communities used throughout this book is having a community with a large number of participants making quality contributions. Given that Wikipedia relies on large numbers of quality contributions, I think this definition of success applies here as well.

Students used Wikipedia as an example of an online community throughout the class. We were asked to join Wikipedia as editors, complete the WikiEdu training, and improve an article. I aim to make helpful recommendations on increasing participation on Wikipedia based on my experience as a newcomer using the design principles discussed in Kraut and Resnick’s “Building Successful Online Communities.”

My Experience
Admittedly, I was hesitant about becoming a contributor to Wikipedia. For context, I prefer to lurk in online communities rather than contributing to them. Part of this hesitancy comes from a lack of understanding of the social norms in a community, and the fear of making a mistake and receiving a negative response from others in the community. Online communities are often harsh in response to people breaking the rules or norms, and being unaware of how these mistakes are generally handled by the rest of the community can be intimidating.

One thing that I did find comforting was that I was not joining Wikipedia alone. The rest of the class were also newcomers to the community, and had the same questions I did. Having a support system of other newcomers was helpful in reducing the barrier to joining.

We were asked to complete several WikiEdu training modules before finding an article to choose. The training modules were helpful in understanding the rules and expectations on Wikipedia. It gave clear direction on how to write articles, find good sources, and use the tools Wikipedia offers. The WikiEdu training modules lacked information on who else was on Wikipedia, how to talk to them, and what the social norms were.

To find an article to edit, WikiEdu recommended searching for articles that needed improvement by category. I found the large number of articles on that list a little overwhelming while searching, so I decided to narrow down articles by topics I’m personally interested in. I have a background in Ecology, so I was excited to find the Ecology WikiProject, and decided to improve the article “The Office of Seed and Plant Introduction.”

As happy as I was to see that there are communities with similar interests within Wikipedia, I really didn’t know if anyone was contributing to that project actively, or what the goal of the WikiProject was.

I enjoyed improving the article “The Office of Seed and Plant Introduction” but wasn’t really sure what to do after that. I had some interaction on the Talk page of the article, but not much, and I realized I would have to go through the process of finding another article to improve. It takes a lot of time to research and improve articles and I am not sure I have enough time to keep participating. I realize there are probably smaller tasks to be done within the community, but I don’t really know how to find out what those are.

Overall, I would consider continuing to participate on Wikipedia. I enjoy writing and editing articles. There are plenty of articles that align with my interests to improve, but what’s missing is a clear sense of what else there is to do in the community, and who else is there. For those reasons, I find myself lacking motivation or commitment to Wikipedia.

I do think that there are some design changes Wikipedia could consider to improve its experience. In particular, I have some recommendations for how Wikipedia can improve motivation to participate, commitment from its members, and better welcome newcomers to the community.

Motivation
One of the simplest actions Wikipedia could take to improve participation is to take advantage of the old saying “ask and you shall receive.” Participants are more likely to do tasks if they know what needs to be done. One place this could be implemented is on Wikipedia’s homepage. There are currently featured articles, but no obvious “articles that need improvement” section. There is information about how many articles are on Wikipedia, but it’s not obvious how many of these articles need work.

I realize though, that many people who use Wikipedia, particularly those who use it all the time, do not see Wikipedia’s homepage often. Therefore, a prompt that asks participants to work on a similar article to one they’ve just edited could exist in their messages or contributions pages. I was intrinsically motivated to contribute to articles that aligned with my interests, and based on what I’ve seen of other Wikipedians, it seems most people are. Leaning into this intrinsic motivation by suggesting articles that need improvement within the same topics could be helpful in motivating contributions.

WikiProjects do this somewhat effectively, by creating lists of articles that need improvement within a topic, but I didn’t realize WikiProjects existed until searching around for a while. Connecting newcomers directly to WikiProjects by asking about their interests upfront could also motivate them to participate.

Commitment
As I previously mentioned, it seems like Wikipedians are primarily editing articles within their areas of interest. This suggests that current contributors are only committed to improving the information available about a subject they like. Which makes sense, because this is the goal of Wikipedia as a whole. However, to improve commitment to Wikipedia overall, I think Wikipedia could work on building commitment between community members. One way this could be done is by making it easier for Wikipedians to find each other, talk to each other, and see each other’s activity.

Just browsing around Wikipedia, it’s not really clear that there is anyone else there to talk to. Showcasing in some way how many other people are actively editing, or making contributions to Wikipedia at any given time or on any article could make it easier for individuals to find other active community members.

One thing to consider however, is just how large Wikipedia is. Kraut and Resnick suggest that people are more likely to participate in smaller groups because there is some personal accountability. Emphasizing WikiProjects as a powerful way to get involved in the community, especially to newcomers, is a viable way for Wikipedia to break up its community into smaller groups. This could include a page with similarities to Reddit, in which Wikipedians can see activity from each of the WikiProjects they’re involved in, all in one place. Not only would this help Wikipedians find others who share similar interests to bond with, it could increase commitment through small-group accountability.

Right now, even if you do find someone who is active, contributions pages are hard to read and understand. It’s difficult to determine if someone has similar interests to you based on articles they’ve edited from their contributions page.

Finally, once you do find someone to connect with, it’s currently not very easy to start talking to them. Learning how to use Talk pages on Wikipedia was one of the things that confused our class the most. It’s not very intuitive for newcomers and is slow to edit. Enabling faster, and more generalized conversations between contributors could be useful for collaborating to improve an article, finding new articles to improve, and for just making new friends. All of these things could increase commitment to the community.

Newcomers
So far, I’ve talked generally about some of the things Wikipedia could do to improve its community for everyone. I’ve mentioned newcomers specifically a couple of times, but I do have some more recommendations for how to recruit newcomers and introduce them to the community so that they actively participate.

As I mentioned before, the WikiEdu training did a good job of describing how to write and edit articles. However, it lacked information on community members and social norms. One way WikiEdu or “The Teahouse” could improve is by offering examples of what other Wikipedians are working on. Tasks besides just editing articles such as writing bots that can check for simple errors, or classifying articles could be interesting to newcomers, and giving information upfront about how others are interacting on Wikipedia already can provide both examples of what appropriate participation looks like, and motivate contribution.

Another way Wikipedia could prove to newcomers that there is an active community on Wikipedia, and teach social norms at the same time, is to create some system to connect newcomers to Wikipedia to someone who has been there a while. This seems to be the intention of “The Teahouse” but I think this could more effectively be done through WikiProjects. “The Teahouse” serves a very large group of newcomers, and is useful for answering general questions. But when it comes to more specific, content related questions, people who have been deeply involved in a specific WikiProject could be better at answering them.

I discussed promoting WikiProjects as a way to increase commitment earlier, but I think these spaces are particularly important for newcomers. Through WikiEdu, or even upon signing up with a Wikipedia account, new contributors could be asked about their interests, and recommended a WikiProject to join. This way, newcomers can be introduced to others within the Wikipedia community that share similar interests with which they can build trust and commitment, and who can effectively demonstrate Wikipedia’s norms in the context of a particular subject.

Finally, Wikipedia should consider actively recruiting new Wikipedians. Opportunities to do this include partnering with schools or universities to get students on the WikiEdu platform, creating a system for current Wikipedians to send articles that need improvement to people they know directly from the platform, and messaging more effectively to the general public about articles that need work. Active recruitment takes some work, but is one of the most effective ways to get newcomers to the platform.

Conclusion
Based on my experience as a newcomer to Wikipedia, I am recommending some design changes that I think will increase participation in the community. These recommendations include improving ease of communication between Wikipedians, breaking the Wikipedia community into smaller communities by emphasizing the importance of WikiProjects, improving the newcomer experience, and actively recruiting new Wikipedians. These changes should increase motivation to participate, commitment to the Wikipedia community, and increase the number of newcomers to the platform. It’s important to note that these changes may have some negative effect on current Wikipedians. For example, an influx of newcomers could frustrate current contributors. Changing talk pages will require learning a new system. Keeping this in mind when deciding how to implement these design changes, will be important in keeping current community members actively engaged. However, if Wikipedia is to continue to be a successful community long-term, I think these design changes are necessary.

Hannahmarriiee (talk) 23:54, 14 May 2021 (UTC)