User:Jinie Ham/Report

Online communities offer opportunities for people to connect with lots of different people in a wide range, of and help people to gain knowledge and information. Yet, depending on how users utilize and use platforms, the community would be beneficial to people or could become a toxic community. It's a community that connects people worldwide, and the regulation is strict, just as physical community rules. To maintain the community and its environment healthily and user-friendly, the community needs to state its rules and norms very clearly to users. In this reflection paper, I will address the connection between course materials and my experience with Wikipedia. Also will propose suggestions for Wikipedia in problem-solving and advice for writers.

The absence of clear norms could cause conflict among the users, and this makes barriers for newcomers to join. This will also confuse users about how to make contributions to the community properly and effectively. The congestion will eventually make users leave the community and will tear them apart. The users that violate rules and make confusion within the community are called trolls, and spammers. Those users tend to be community outsiders, and the most common reason they do such things is that they want attention or fame.

From my experience with Wikipedia, I realized that Wikipedia has a pretty well-organized structure; starting with making an account and making contributions to article improvements. Moving forwards, each step was very detailed in explanation so it was easy to understand the rules and follow through. Instead of using real names, Wikipedia allows users to use whatever name they want to use. However, the problem of not using the real name causes consequences for spammers and trolls. While the community respects users’ privacy and is flexible, some users use this to their advantage to ruin the community.

This goes the same for Wikipedia; because of anonymity and the fact that anyone could make changes to articles, some users write irrelevant sentences to articles. This has both negative and positive aspects of Wikipedia. Because the rules of Wikipedia allow anyone to make changes to articles, students like me could make improvements and learn hands-on experiences. I had instructions who could lead me in the right way and give professional advice so that throughout the process I could get confirmation from her and make proper changes to my assigned article. Before making direct changes to the article, I first used a sandbox and worked from there. But Wikipedia isn't required to use sandbox- if users want to, they can make direct changes to the article. At first, I didn’t fully understand the way of using the sandbox, so I made the mistake of writing directly on the article and publishing changes. From that experience, I realized that Wikipedia has really easy access to making changes to articles. Because of this easy, and low barrier to making changes to articles, trolls are adding content that is not appropriate and irrelevant.

The other thing I learned from the process is that tone matters. The article should not sound like an essay which means it should not sound like an opinionated article. As a student who wrote lots of essays, when it comes to writing- writing in an essay tone was so used to me. So on the sandbox, when I wrote the draft I used lots of “you” words when I tried to explain, and included my thoughts and opinions in it. But in the class, I learned that the article should sound descriptive of information. In this way, the readers don’t be biased by reading articles and just gain pure information from them. In my opinion, this is one of the crucial key points of Wikipedia. The writers of Wikipedia should let the readers make their own decisions of knowledge. The article should not make the readers think in certain ways. Because the role of the Wikipedia article is to deliver the right information to the readers.

My thoughts on solving these problems are that they require users to use sandboxes. And let professionals or programmed AIs confirm the content of what the users wrote on the sandbox and filter it out before it goes live publicly. These days, systematic AI platforms are active among online communities as well. If Wikipedia adopts an AI program, people can get feedback 24/7 instantly also, which can also make the community more professional and reliable. It’s hard to have professional instructors to guide users daily for lots of people, so if Wikipedia provides that system and supports users- it’ll be very helpful for users to make positive contributions to Wikipedia communities and will learn from the experience like me.

While Wikipedia has organized systems, I think having a stronger system process for publishing changes on the article will develop this platform to be more trustworthy. But instead of blaming the system, the writers need to make changes first. The users need to have responsibility in the online community even though not visible and has acknowledged norms and regulations. When it comes to editing articles, we all need to have the mindset of we’re professionals who are responsible for readers to gain informative knowledge.