User:Ivychen0619/Report

As a new user who joined Wikipedia in early January 2022 and successfully contributed heavily under the article 'Jiangxi Cuisine' after drafting in the sandbox, I would like to offer some suggestions towards the improvement Wikipedia can do based on my one-month experience within the community. Before joining Wikipedia, I was only a reader but not an editor. Wikipedia was more of a way to get knowledge when I needed to know some new topics in the very first place. From my perspective, what motivated me to start editing in Wikipedia is more about extrinsic motivation. Instead of enjoying the editing process, I am more looking forward to achieving the outcome that I want the cuisine from my mother's hometown Jiangxi spread to the world, especially in America. There is no doubt that certain people make contributions to Wikipedia driven by the intrinsic motives in which these users enjoy the process of fulfilling the content of the article. However, through the Wikipedia: Purpose page, people can clearly see most of the users who participated all have a certain emotional connection to Wikipedia, which can be viewed as identity-based commitment where users all want to help Wikipedia fulfill its mission --- be a reliable resource. In addition, I learned that Wikipedia is also aimed at producing public goods in which every single person on the Earth has access to this free encyclopedia. Thus, as a free encyclopedia, one of the essential norms within the Wikipedia community is to ensure the neutrality of the content. This is what I benefited the most from this one-month experience in Wikipedia since I am not used to writing articles in a neutral tone since I always wrote something related to my experience in most of my university writing. I need to carefully consider the word choice to ensure my article's neutrality.

Nevertheless, Retaining the existing users, attracting new users, maintaining order within the community, and so on are common concerns in various famous online communities like Wikipedia that aim to produce public goods. During my editing in this first month, I experience some frustration about the new users' training on Wikipedia Education Dashboard and have concerns about my contribution to the live article as I move forward in the future. Thus, I would split my suggestion into two fields, the training provided to new users and how to prevent the existing contribution from intentionally or unintentionally being removed or edited.

To begin with, as I am drafting in my sandbox, I recognized that the purpose of the sandbox is to protect my work from other users editing or deleting my draft, especially the harmful behavior that might be caused by new users. And this is the unique place for Wikipedia in which the community offers a safe zone to benefit both the new users and the previous existing users. Users, especially new users like me who are not familiar with the norms in the community, can feel free to draft and learn without the worry of causing real damage in the Wikipedia community. However, not every new user might behave appropriately. If they want, they can freely change the existing content in the live article or even delete and edit previous work without any permission. There is a lack of barrier or requirement to edit the live article. I suddenly realized my contribution would be under the same situation once I published my draft to the live article in my sandbox. Thus, I have a total of two recommended approaches to address this concern most users like me might have.

One of the approaches to protecting the community from harmful behaviors by newcomers no matter the users with good faith but ignorant of the norms or participants drive-by intrinsic motivates with bad faith who want to sabotage the community, is through escalating privileges like the Stack exchange community did. This method is a win-win situation for both the users and the community. Because it not only motivated participants to make more contributions by extrinsic rewards like the users will be able to delete or edit other people's work when they reach the highest level, but also as a method maintain order within the Wikipedia of regulating behavior. In addition, the community can ensure that the group of people who can cause severe damage to the community --- delete or edit previous work --- are no longer any random group of users. In contrast, it is the group with the lowest probability to sabotage the community since this group of people act in ways that have been in line with the community's norms for a long time.

The second approach is Wikipedia should raise the barrier of contribution within the community. The new users need to wait at least two weeks to fully understand the community's norm and complete a certain task related to how to behave in the community in order to contribute to the existing article. However, a tradeoff will exist, like what happened when Wikipedia required the user to create an account to make contributions in the early time. The number of insufficient contributions that were happening to the Wikipedia community went down dramatically, which decreased from 40 bad contributions on the average week to 10 bad contributions. Nevertheless, the number of good contributions in good faith decreases enormously also, with around 25 to 40 percent decrease.

However, consider that the issue of vandalism, spam, and other kinds of problematic material publish is common in the Wikipedia community. Under this circumstance, in order to achieve the goals of letting Wikipedia become a credible source, the primary goal is to ensure all the editing occurring are professional enough, and the existing or future participants will make contributions consistently. The costly barriers (it will be the time in this case) indicate only more motivated individuals will join the community. Since participation leads to 'sunk costs,' people will consider the consequence (e.g., possibly losing their account) if they do not follow the norms. I sincerely believe Wikipedia needs to focus on the quality of the contribution besides increasing the quantity of the edit through attracting a significant number of new users.

Besides completely blocking the type of users who intentionally break the community norms driven by intrinsic motivation, the trickiest question that exists in the Wikipedia community is to address the 'unsocialized' newcomer like me in the first place. According to the research done in Change.org about the topic 'are active change.org users born or made,' the experiment concluded with the statement that 'valuable users are both attracted and cultivated.' Thus, training these newcomers is another field Wikipedia should pay attention to because these newcomers are potential valuable users in the future if the community offers excellent training. Wikipedia did have the training in the Wikipedia Education Dashboard related to the second advice I offered about letting the new users do the specific task associated with how to behave in the community. However, I must admit that I don't have great training experience in the Wikipedia Education Dashboard. I need to read many complex and lengthy rules for every module when I do this training. And this heavy reading did discourage me in the first place. To be honest, I won't continue if this is not one of the required assignments in my communication class.

There is no doubt that when the new user is learning something within the community, texts are far less straightforward than showing the user and providing examples through the recording video. At the same time, institutionalized socialization like the Wikipedia Education Dashboard training that users need to go through a set of experiences and a set of steps might be hard for the users to learn the norms of the community compared with the individualized socialization. There will be an individual showing me how to do or answer my question for the individualized socialization. In my case, without the help of teachers and classmates in my class who have experience with Wikipedia before, I won't understand the norms for Wikipedia that easily because I usually have trouble understanding many of the rules and exercises are shown in training. Most importantly, when I do the citation or a certain part, I am not sure about the rule; I always have trouble finding the right page to match the rule I am looking for. Thus, I suggest that Wikipedia can offer certain individualized socialization to assist the new users in their training path. The community can provide the online agent services combined with the artificial intelligence assistant software on the page of the Wikipedia education dashboard, which the user can easily access. The new users can simply ask the artificial intelligence assistant what kind of rules they are looking for, and the assistant will list out the matching rule according to the users' requests. If the users are still unable to get the answer from the artificial intelligence assistant, they can move to the real person agent services. This improvement might need a great fortune of money, but I firmly believe that this will speed up the learning process for new users to learn the community norms and rules.

And the following above is all the advice I offered towards my experience in Wikipedia as a new user. Thank you for your attention to my suggestions. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions on the talk page, and I would be happy to answer that.