User:Jadejjjade/Report

Jade Xie

Benjamin Mako Hill

COM482

2020/02/14

Wikipedia reflection

In this Wikipedia reflection essay, I am going to first, discuss the problems that I found through the way of using Wikipedia and contributing to Wikipedia; second, my personal experience of working with Wikipedia; third, how the lecture materials and case studies related to what I was working on; and fourth, the theories and concepts that applied to my Wikipedia project experience. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia maintained as by the community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system. At the same time, Wikimedia Foundation is the company that owns Wikipedia as a content project. Taken information from the lectures and the Wikipedia assignment, I have a few insights about the community of Wikipedia.

One thing that I found really interesting was that when I was finding stubs, most articles that are under the “Chinese cuisine” category, is actually well developed in the Chinese version of Wikipedia(维基百科). By searching related or similar articles on both English Wikipedia and other language version of Wikipedia, I found that editors all around the world participate in so many different languages, and a lot of information and knowledge are very well-developed in certain languages but very poor in English. I believe that articles that contributed in languages other than English should be translated into the language of English, and at the same time, as the main languageof Wikipedia here, articles in English should be contributed into other languages as well. Moreover, I believe that promoting Wikipedia project to more college campuses is also an effective way of advertise themselves. Students will be engaged in to the activity once they have an idea of how the community of Wikipedia works, and have both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation of contributing. According to the Motivation (Part I) “A Qualitative Assessment of Yelp.Com Users’ Motivations to Submit and Read Restaurant Reviews.”, “Approximately 20% of the responses indicated they contributed to Yelp.com because they found it enjoyable.” That says, once people participate and engaged into an online community, they become part of it. People enjoy contributing and sharing information in the community in that as part of the community, it makes them feel special and privileged. On the other hand, Leaving the community behind is not the first choice the students want to make simply because most of the course material and practices are based on the Wikipedia community.

Through this Wikipedia assignment, I have learned the rules and norms of Wikipedia in general, and I was taught how to become a “Wikipedian” step by step, as known as a qualified Wikipedia contributor. Most importantly, I have learned the the importance of participating into online communities, how to driven users’ participation (motivation), and how to stay neutral, and speak neutral while participating. We can see that different speech communities have different understanding about specific ideas, especially about some controversial topics. For example, while PRC and ROC both claiming the territorial rights of Taiwan, we can see very differently that the content material explaining “Taiwan” in Chinese Wikipedia and English Wikipedia stands on different points of view. In both language of Wikipedia, there are two articles standing on opposite of the territorial rights. By this, we can see that Wikipedia is not trying to mute any side of the communication happening, and is standing on a neutral side while some controversial ideas are shown.

As the first & second week’s course material was mentioning, we should pay more attention on the lack of online community participation. The case study of Yelp on the case board showed us a few useful ways of encouraging more engagement among users. Applying to the community of Wikipedia, I believe that Wikipedia can create a way of “daily attendance checks”, and if users continued signed in of contributing/editing in a row of “x days”, can get rewards of upgrading to a higher level, and get a faster speed of growing to an even higher level. The levels can be used to transferred to other rewards relating to the community of Wikipedia or communities that collaborate with Wikipedia, such as other projects under Wikipedia Foundation like Wiki commons, Wikibooks etc. This could be an effective extrinsic motivation in that generally speaking, more people are driven by extrinsic motivation than intrinsic motivation. This advice is different from a new user in that by looking at the cases in the class, I realized that having a sense of intrinsic motivation is very hard, but sometimes a little bit of extrinsic motivation actually helps a lot.

In last two weeks, we discussed “Newcomers” in the lecture class. I found the theories and concepts mentioned in the reading material matched explicitly with the problems that I encountered. We, as the “newcomers” of Wikipedia, tend to make a lot of mistakes while contributing. Some of the contribution by be un-qualified (e.g. not speaking in a neutral tone), and some of the contribution might be not familiar with the community norms. At the same time, we, as the “new blood”, are highly engaged, and generated a lot of information and knowledge to the community. Once we are lead the right way, I believe that we could become those significant contributors to the community of Wikipedia.

To wrap up, In the experience of working with Wikipedia, I have learned how the encyclopedia system works, how the website of Wikipedia is written and operated by a community of volunteers all around the world. In the second half of the course, I would like to learn more about, how to interact with online communities more professionally and effectively, how to create a new community with a team, and how to better maintain and improve those existing online communitieswith more actual practices and activities.