User:Jonathan Kvech/report

In my experience updating the Ickey Shuffle article I found that Wikipedia is a very effective online community that successfully employs many of the concepts we have covered well but could stand to benefit from their improvement in a few key concepts.

Wikipedia has difficulty turning engagement into commitment, their contributions are lower than they would them to be, and lower than they could be. The community has many readers with not nearly as many active and reliable contributors. Many of its articles are stubs, which is problematic because stub articles do not contain a lot of information and thus saturate the community with articles that are not very helpful. This is detrimental the community’s goal of becoming a useful online encyclopedia, given the majority of its “encyclopedic” articles are not all that in depth.

One significant way that Wikipedia could motivate its users to contribute more is to turn the community into a more immersive social environment. I noticed through my time contributing, that communicating with fellow Wikipedians through the site is not a very smooth process and the presence of the other users are not intimately felt. In order to communicate with someone, you must go to their talk page and ping them, hoping for a response at a later time and date, which then comes back to you from a bland username with no profile picture next to it or anything of the sorts. Ultimately, adding more social features would make contributing more intrinsically satisfying. As discussed in lecture, fun is cited as the top reason for participation in surveys of many top communities, so Wikipedia should look to increase the warmth of the contribution process by allowing users a more intimate knowledge of who they are contributing with. Some effective ways for Wikipedia to do this would be to install a live chat function, similar to Facebook messenger, where users can see who is currently “live” editing and send private direct messages to one another. Thus, satisfying people’s intrinsic needs of having fun interacting with others, while also allowing them to build bond-based commitment through more tangible social connection. Adding a live chat function, where you can see who is on Wikipedia and who is currently contributing can also inspire people to go check out what their friends are currently interested in and what they have been contributing to lately. This live chat function could also work to satisfy users’ extrinsic motivations of praise, allowing people to receive immediate gratification for their contributions. Furthermore, Wikipedia should allow users to create more personal user profiles, inspiring them to add personal photos of themselves to their profiles. Wikipedia should allow people to display folders or icons on their profiles designating what categories of articles they contribute to and frequent most. Additionally, instead of user’s contributions being listed in a long unruly fashion, they should users to allocate certain contributions into personalized designated folders, labeled by the category of article. This will further allow for users to feel connected with one another through the observation of one another’s profiles, seeing similarities between their contributions and interests. Adding these designated folders would also result in inciting needs-based commitment in users, the folders would clearly outline their hard work. Making their contributions more readily apparent every time they or others open their user page. Thus, highlighting to users the sunk cost that would result from their leaving. Furthermore, Wikipedia should add a WikiFriends function, allowing for easy repeat interactions between users. Users would have their own list of friends and would be able to add more through friend-of a friend mechanism such as “add these users as friends”. Inspiring people to venture onto other people’s pages and to contribute to the articles their friends are contributing to. This could also inspire the recruitment of social ties, Wikipedia could encourage people to for bring in contributors who are not already members of the community, to begin contributing to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia would also stand to gain by adding a reddit, online forum type spinoff, to their website, called WikiBlogs or something similar. Thus, allowing for people to split into smaller subgroups of the community, warranting increased contribution. Users would be able to have a blog feed in which they could see the articles/categories that they are following themselves, on top of the categories that their “Wikifriends” are subscribed to as well. All in all, allowing for people to increase their bonds-based commitment as they are able to connect with more people and expand their circle of wikifriends. An alternative website such as this could also help with the socialization and retention of newcomers. Allowing for new users to subscribe to groups designated for new Wikipedia users who will be able share their newfound experiences of do’s and don’t’s for Wikipedia. Letting others know “I did this.. and it got removed”, or “I did this.. and got praised”. This would allow for these newcomers to gain an informal understanding of the community’s norms, while additionally allowing for them to have some initial friendly interactions with fellow newcomers. Other more experienced members of Wikipedia should be encouraged to form sub-groups tailored towards sharing the experiences they had when they first joined the community, and what they wish someone had told them before they began to contribute. Through this project, I learned a lot about the important norms of wikipedia, keeping a neutral tone within your contributions and doing your utmost to contribute with the intrinsic motivation of improving an article that I feel others could stand to benefit from knowing more about. (Albeit also with the extrinsic motivation of earning a good grade in this class of course too). Lastly, I can personally say that I am a living example of the concept of participation leading to value and sunk cost. Now that I have invested this time into becoming a proficient Wikipedian I am motivated to stay committed to contributing to even more articles and by extenstion the community as a whole.