User:IsaacM24/Report

Isaac Mohn

COM 482

07 November 2020

Wikipedia Reflection Essay

As my work on my Wikipedia article comes to a close, I think that I have learned more than I ever thought about Wikipedia as an online community. Wikipedia is a website that millions of people use everyday, and thousands contribute too, but only few know the major flaws that it contains. Through my own experience, my advice to the Wikipedia community would be to become more accessible and friendly to the newcomers on the site.

Wikipedia has become an extremely mature and oligarchic community, where few active users do most of the work. I believe that that is the main issue with the site, the ability for them to recruit new people to become active members stands as a blockade for growth. But, I also think that there is a way to fix this issue, creating a new Wikipedia profile or page shouldn’t be as difficult as it is. Firstly, Wikipedia should create a more interactive experience in the sandbox when a new user arrives. I think creating an AI tool or “office assistant” (like the paperclip from Microsoft Office) that could give newcomers detailed instruction as they work through their sandbox. The AI could lay out the groundwork of Wikipedia, give tips, introduce site norms, and guide newcomers in a more friendly and safe way. Doing this as opposed to throwing new site members to the wolves when they first begin, would allow for less newcomers disruption and socialization from veteran members.

To follow that I also believe Wikipedia could do a better job with it's overall recruitment process. Wikipedia definitely has an idea of who they want to attract to become active editors. People who are passionate about creating an encyclopedia, and who will learn and put up with the frivolous rules and norms surrounding the site. But, those people are hard to find. I believe a way to fix this is to open up recruitment on Wikipedia to a wider range of people, and be more open to mistakes. Wikipedia’s oligarchic nature makes recruiting the “right” people hard, because the criteria seems so specific. All the unknown norms and regulations of Wikipedia are hard to pick up on at the start, so making the site less complex and more user friendly could bring in an abundance of new users.

My personal experience of Wikipedia as a whole went more smoothly than I thought it would. I decided that I wanted to create a new article from scratch instead of contributing to an already existing one. I made an article about my favorite podcast called the Rewatchables, which has many sports and film personalities taking deep dives into movies that are generally cherished by society. As I began my Wikipedia assignment I was excited, creating this page from scratch that I knew anyone in the world could see was enticing. But right away I ran into some roadblocks that I wasn't expecting. Podcasts on Wikipedia are most of the time not considered “notable” enough to really deserve their own page. And as much as I enjoy the Rewatchables, I realized that there wasn't too much content or sources out there about it. So, I had to work a lot harder to find reliable sources about the podcast, and be sure that not the entirety of my Wikipedia page was just my own work and ideas. I think overall I learned that the process of creating a new Wikipedia page is more demanding and thorough than I could’ve imagined. I learned that Wikipedia prides itself on accuracy more than anything, and these pages created by anonymous people aren't just their thoughts on the matter, but well researched facts and data.

As a newcomer to the Wikipedia site as of a month ago, I think my recommendation of making the site more usable and operative for newcomers holds higher merit. Through my experience I can attest to the lack of socialization that Wikipedia provides to its newcomers. As a class we had the Wiki Education page that gave us lessons on how to do specific things with our articles. Creating an article from scratch without the help or guidance of anyone seems like an impossible task to me. Anyone can go onto Wikipedia and edit or create, and I think that's the appeal of the site, but I also think that no newcomers really know how to do it right. There is a very informal socialization that occurs on Wikipedia, with new users having to learn as they go. If Wikipedia dedicated time to create a more collective and individual way of socialization, where new users were trained properly, I believe the site would be more successful.

Based on my experience with Wikipedia I would try and make the site itself less complicated. The goal of Wikipedia is to create a worldwide encyclopedia that is above all accurate, and to do this you have to have many precautions, which is why I understand that it seems burdensome to get involved. But if they were able to make that process lighter, and decrease the amount of unwritten norms of the site, they could build a bigger base of editors. On another note, I think what separates Wikipedia from other online communities is that it may seem difficult to get involved at the start, if you become an active and trusted member of the community the experience can be tremendously valuable. Wikipedia makes it hard to “game” the system, and social recognition is given to those who do the best work, and is given by other active members on the site. If you can break through, socialize yourself, and dedicate your time to becoming an active member of Wikipedia, you have the opportunity to educate people all around the globe with your contributions.