User:JianiW/Report

Wikipedia Reflection Essay
The page I worked on is about the artificial intelligence industry in China. While the extrinsic motivation – working for school credits – pushes me to contribute to the Wikipedia community, the intrinsic motivation prompted me to select a niche topic and produce high-quality work spending much more time and effort than what is expected in the project. Wikipedia Foundation is definitely a unique way to gather potential contributors by partnering with colleges and institutions. My intrinsic motivation is incentivized by my academic interests in China’s AI development. While selecting a page for the project, I recognized a handful of outdated information on the relevant Wikipedia page, and I feel obligated to expand the page with a more comprehensive view from diverse sources to the audience. My normative commitment is hoping to gain the public’s interest in the particular topic by providing multidisciplinary approaches.

Joining the Wikipedia community is very low cost, the process was simple, and the goal of the community is clear. Going through the training process for the Wikipedia community is a low stake assignment with a low barrier that is easy to commit. Since I only need to click through all the training materials, I recognize the tradeoffs for such a design. I did not pay enough attention to the detail of the training contents, and I often had to check training materials during the writing process.

Different from the code of conduct from other platforms like Ruby and Ubuntu, Wikipedia has explicit explanations and emphasis on its role as an open-source platform producing public goods, as well as its norms and rules, such as content neutrality. These clear expressions helped me form awareness of constantly checking in with myself whether I have produced content in an unbiased and neutral tone. This approved Kraut’s statement that an accurate and clear impression of online communities would increase the likelihood of newcomers’ contributions. Moreover, Wikipedia adopted a social translucence system. The sense of Wikipedia as a community and the idea that everything is accessible by the public made me more selective in references so that I would not be called out for including uncredited or false information in my contribution. I’m more committed to finding reliable sources and ensuring the accuracy of my own writing. Monitoring and moderating contents are one of Wikipedia’s strategies to limit negative effects by newcomers since sometimes mistakes could be made in good intentions. While it worked for me, it might not work for people who are uncomfortable with the sense of constant monitoring.

One thing I found interesting is Wikipedia’s auto-generated message on the talk page that highlighted the topic as a part of Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Such a simple notification eased my pressure as a newcomer who did not know the community well. This followed Wikipedia’s ‘don’t bite the newcomers’ approaches. Furthermore, collaboration is an essential feature in the Wikipedia community, which is reflected in two parts of my experience. Firstly, unlike other platforms, such as Reddit where users interact with each other through comments, Wikipedia allows users to directly edit and contribute to existing pages that others might have worked on previously. For me, it does take courage to directly edit others’ work and I could see myself ending up not contributing to the page if I were not doing it for a class. Additionally, the talk page encourages discussions among contributors noting areas of improvement and status quo for the topic. For instance, the talk page for the topic I worked on highlighted the lack of secondary references, which provide directions for me to contribute.

My sense as a member of the community became stronger after my page went live having more Wikipedians editing my works and sending me ‘thanks’ notes, especially from Wikipedia Education Foundation’s executive director. In fact, I started to spend more time checking with the page every day thinking about areas for further improvements. These positive feedbacks and inclusive languages approved Kraut’s design claim that newcomers are more likely to retain if they have positive initial interactions with ‘old-timers’ in the community.

From my personal experience transitioning from a Wikipedia user to a contributor, I have four recommendations about how Wikipedia could change to attract more newcomers and increase contributions. Firstly, adding optional features to let users select topics that they are generally interested in could help Wikipedia identify the targeted groups who potentially have higher intrinsic motivations to contribute to the subjects that they are passionate about. This referred to Kraut’s design claim of attracting the right people. Moreover, when I was deciding on the topic that I plan to work on, there are overwhelming numbers of topics on Wikipedia, and I even didn’t know where to start. By considering an optional ‘bi-weekly’ email summary about the latest updates in the topics of users’ selections, it helped form a sense of the community where users feel tightly connected and are up to date while having the option to opt-out email updates anytime. In email updates, there could be a section highlighting five articles that were randomly selected from the topics with clear and short demonstrations for improvement.

Lastly, Wikipedia could consider creating ‘discussion panel pages’ for individual umbrella categories that are similar to Reddit subgroups to increase users’ identity-based commitment to a community. This is according to Kraut’s claim that subgroups formed by people with shared interests could strengthen the bonding and connection to a community. Writing drafts in the sandbox is a relatively isolated process where I did not have a chance to interact with other users in the community. I hope to share the pages that I was working on with others throughout the writing process so that I could revise the content along the way. Another way to solve the issues is to rename auto-generated greeting messages from the platform to more approachable names rather than apparent robots. Wikipedia could consider launching a voluntary mentorship as well where old-timers and newcomers could voluntarily sign up as mentors and mentees, just like Professor Miko and Kaylea mentor students in actual writing processes.