User:JEMGC/Report

As a student of a course on online communities (COM481) and a newcomer to Wikipedia, I made contributions by editing the Washington Trails Association article in Wikipedia. Via a process over the course of multiple weeks, I conducted a series of steps including selecting the article, gathering reliable secondary sources for research, drafting edits in my sandbox, peer-reviewing classmates’ work, and updating the live version of the article. This was an attempt to progress the article from stub class to at least start class to ultimately improve Wikipedia’s online encyclopedia community. From this interactive experience, I learned how to become fluent in Wikipedia editing norms and regulations, how to respectfully communicate with other Wikipedians via talk pages, and how the Wikipedia community should make their online community better by being able to identify what works and what doesn’t from an analytical and theory-based newcomer perspective. By evaluating Wikipedia’s competence in attracting the appropriate people and in then successfully welcoming and integrating those who show up, I’m able to offer actionable advice to the Wikimedia Foundation on how to improve their online community. I assess my experience in terms of the five principles of effectively managing newcomers: recruitment, selection, protection, socialization, and retention (Kraut, 2012, p. 180).

Before taking COM481, I had never contributed to Wikipedia before, and I had no intention to. I was first introduced to Wikipedia in elementary school, and I was taught that it is an unreliable academic source and to generally try to avoid interacting with it. From then until now, I have not witnessed any attempt on Wikipedia’s part to actively recruit contributors. Accordingly, my lack of motivation to contribute was linked to Wikipedia’s lack of advertisement and interpersonal recruitment (which includes recruitment via word of mouth, already existing social networking sites, and influential users) which resulted in the withstanding of my prior belief of Wikipedia’s inadequacies. I understand that the Wikimedia Foundation may avoid mass advertising to the public because of their desire to avoid interactions with spammers, trolls, griefs, vandals, and some inappropriate good faith contributors who would be detrimental to the community. However, encouraging increased interpersonal recruitment––for example, after someone contributes something that improves the community, the Wikimedia Foundation could send a message to that user urging them to invite people they believe would be a good contributor in return for a badge––would continue their growth in numbers as well as more likely keep out large numbers of unwanted contributors. Wikipedia’s target contributors are those who are educated or can easily learn how to be fluent in English speaking and writing, in credibility of sources, and in Wikipedia’s norms and regulations overall. Interpersonal recruitment would allow for one educated contributor to spread the word and invite other trusted individuals and suitable contributors. In some sense, along with other motivators, this is the way in which I ended up contributing. My COM481 professor extrinsically and intrinsically prompted me to contribute. I needed a decent project grade for my class, but the idea of expanding the general knowledge of the public by contributing to an extensive online encyclopedia seemed appealing as well, so I tried my best to produce my highest quality work. Because of my education qualifications and efforts, I feel like I was an appropriate individual to contribute to Wikipedia. I self-selected into this community, but only because my COM481 class and linked Wiki Education support were the ones that provided “an accurate and complete picture of what the members’ experience will be once they join” (Kraut, 2012, p. 200). Wikipedia itself could do a better job at encouraging appropriate people to join through their self-selection practices, especially for all of those who are not currently students. By making a brief introduction video that highlights the ways of the community, Wikipedia may motivate those who have an affective identity-based connection to the topic to self-select, prompting more of the “right” users to join and less of the “wrong” ones.

COM481 introduced me to the Wiki Education platform, where I learned about sandboxes. As a newcomer with good intentions, these sandboxes protected me from doing harm in the community while still in the process of learning how to properly integrate. Beyond protection, without access to or knowledge of the institutionalized socialization––the collective, formal, sequential, and fixed fashion of effectively integrating newcomers according to Kraut (2012)––of the Wiki Education platform, contributing new edits to Wikipedia articles would be too difficult and risky for the average user. Because Wikipedia’s “Policies and guidelines” page that lists their descriptive norms is long and draining to read, without Wiki Education I would have accidentally broken some Wikipedia rules. Furthermore, after making my sandbox updates of the Washington Trails Association article live, I was also informally individually socialized into the community as someone added a maintenance “advertisement” tag to my article, encouraging Wikipedians to assist in making it seem less promotional and more neutral. I respect the contributors’ views and did delete a few words and a link to increase neutrality of the tone, but for the most part I did not agree in part because of the contrasting opinions of my multiple peer reviewers. While this individualized socialization experience with a random Wikipedian on my stub article highlighted the legitimacy of my participation in the periphery of the community and effectively taught me how to behave, this one and only interaction that lacked back-and-forth communication and subsequently any bonds threatened my commitment to Wikipedia and presumably Wikipedia’s retention of newcomers that encounter similar experiences. While my experience contributing to Wikipedia was not poor, it was not outstanding enough to make me want to come back. Wikipedia does attempt to make newcomer experiences positive by sending welcoming and encouraging notices. However, assigning an experienced user to assist a newcomer in completing sets of learning steps regarding making their first contributions could make it even more so by generating bonds-based commitment while also creating a more easily accessible way of combining institutionalized and individualized socialization to maximize effectiveness.

Works Cited

Kraut, R. E., & Resnick, P. (2012). Building successful online communities : Evidence-based social design. MIT Press.