User:Hmk0110/report

Wikipedia Reflection Essay

Wikipedia always had a negative notion in my mind ever since my high school history teacher’s ten-minute rant during my U.S. history class on a sunny February morning. Mr.Harrison was in disbelief at how many students referenced and trusted information from an internet website that anyone can change and add. He ended the class with “NEVER USE WIKIPEDIA, PERIOD” and I was pretty convinced at that time that Wikipedia was not the place to find information.

The negative pre-notion that I once had revolved after learning about the online community, especially Wikipedia. I revolved to understand Wikipedia is not the place to grab and leave with information but rather a reference page to open up doors and find related sources to dive into multiple resources. Active articles with mass public interest had multiple people editing and having a productive discord. The idea of open source and collective knowledge shined in these active articles. However, articles with one or two contributions such as stub articles showcased the disbelief that Mr.Harrison had. The issue that I faced that I had in contributing to a dedicated Wikipedia article was the lack of activities on the talk page and contributions from others. It had a similar persona to shouting into an empty cave in the sense that the only voice to my suggestions and questions was my voice. To be honest, the initial motivation and excitement tumbled down, and probably would not continue contributing to the article if it was not part of the class. Moreover, the lack of interactions highly contributes to underdeveloped stub articles with misinformation. The idea of having a sit staging zone like Area 51 was more convincing after exploring underdeveloped articles in Wikipedia as a source of quality control which guarantees a bare minimum platform to work on and finding enough people that are committed to developing the article. For Wikipedia, the idea of having bare minimum contributors before opening to the public will contribute to restoring the ethos that underdeveloped articles missed. The bare minimum requirement can be creating a collective sandbox tab right next to the article or creating a clear sign to indicate not enough people contributed to the article.

The suggestion that I have to boost interest in stub articles is to utilize different online communities to target and cater to a specific group of people. The interconnection between different communities would redirect interest from other communities in building an article involving the topic of Wikipedia articles. In a specific notion, I worked on an article called 'Hook grip' for the Wikipedia article assignment which is an article about a specific weightlifting technique. The overall activity level in the article was low with virtually no opinions being responded from the talk page. The lack of interest in the Wikipedia article caught my mind since techniques around gripping the barbell are a frequent topic in physical gyms and Reddit’s online communities. Reddit's r/powerlifting and r/weightlifting communities are about 290K members combined. The incorporation and utilization of a preexisting active community will generate interest around underdeveloped articles on Wikipedia. However, the main concern with the cross over the idea is the different norms around these two online communities. Wikipedia as an online community desires unbiased information about the topic, but on Reddit, the norm trends toward freely expressing opinions toward the subject like what type of technique is superior in relation to other barbell grips. Thus, it is important to establish and remind the norms of Wikipedia once the user arrives to cross contribute to Wikipedia. This can be addressed as a pop-up banner on the top to remind the Wikipedia contribution expectation once a user is identified as a contributor transferred through a link posted from a different online community.

The key to intrinsic and extrinsic motivation ever seems to be finding a good balance between the two motivations. However, the recent experience with the Wikipedia assignment appears to have an imbalance between the two motivations. The personal notion that I had to work through a Wikipedia article and research different stub articles was that countless articles were relying solely on the intrinsic motivation from an enthusiastic individual. It is noteworthy to realize that Wikipedia has a system that awards quality articles with Barnstars, yet the high contribution and high reward model of Wikipedia’s Barnstar was not an appealing extrinsic motivation for small time articles with few contributions. The suggestion that I have is to create an extrinsic motivation system that rewards the initiation process of an article. This can be addressed as incorporating similar extrinsic motivations from Slashdot by creating a Karma point system that rewards users for contributing to a stub article and rewarding interactions in the talk page by providing feedback and interactions. Moreover, the general idea behind the Karma point system for Wikipedia is to provide a smaller portion of extrinsic motivations for smaller articles. The preexisting Barnstar system can also expand toward rewarding by creating a Barnstar for individuals who are promoting stub articles and providing a starting ground for others.

In the eyes of the general public, one of the most prominent negative images toward Wikipedia is the lack of credibility. Perhaps that was one of the biggest issues that Mr.Harrison was facing as looking into the Wikipedia page. The lack of ‘experts’ contributing to the article degrades the legitimacy of the information on Wikipedia for the mass public without proper education on online communities. Thus, a method to address the distrust between general users is to build a system that verifies individuals with higher knowledge toward the topic and rewards contributions from the verified individuals. For example, in an article that revolves around gene editing, individuals with extensive research experience and higher education in biochemistry can volunteer to be verified. Moreover, after the verification process is completed these individuals would have exclusive privilege in awarding Barnstars that authenticates the Wikipedia article with objective and fair information. The approval from a professional in the specific field would mitigate the distrust that some people hold toward Wikipedia articles. Getting a stamp of approval from a professional can be also argued that it is not contributing much from the article quality standpoint. Since most articles are already citing professional academic studies and research papers. However, a simple stamp of approval might be enough to convince individuals like Mr.Harrison with fundamental distrust toward open-source online communities.