User:Jstnwoo/Report

Reflection Essay

In terms of functionality and ease of access, I think Wikipedia can be improved in a lot of ways. One of the biggest issues that I ran into off the bat was that while the visual editor was really convenient and intuitive when it came to being able to see the changes I made in real time rather than trying to visualize my changes through the source editing mode, there was still some limitations that I ran into where it just seemed easier to use the source editing mode to make certain changes that weren’t as easy on the visual editing mode. One of the issues that instances related to this issue was when I was using a template to create a company infobox. Editing the infobox while in visual editing mode was essentially impossible because of the interface that popped up to edit the template didn’t allow me to use any of the normal features within visual editing like adding bullet points, citing previously used sources, bolding, or italicizing of text. Because of this issue I had to resort to using Wiki markup to make the changes I wanted within the infobox which made things a bit harder than I thought it needed to be. More advice I would suggest is that Wikipedia make the action of comparing versions of articles more visually appealing and cohesive. How it is now, looking at changes done by users and comparing two different versions of an article will only show changes to each particular line side by side. While this does its job, being someone that heavily relies on seeing the greater picture of things, it makes it hard to see these changes represented in the article as whole. I suggest taking the way how changes are previewed before being published in visual edit mode and applying that when comparing versions of articles. The way things are visually denoted by red meaning an omission and green meaning an addition would really help in signify distinctively what has been changed between versions. Another suggestion that I would give is to have designated examples of articles that pertain to different categories. For example, having a sample article about a musical artist with common types of information displayed like information about discography, controversies, or creative direction could really help new members that are just starting out figure out what topics to search and write about.

Overall, improving the Dover Street Market article was really rewarding, especially knowing that contributions will have a direct effect on a topic that I’m passionate about and genuinely wish to improve. Throughout the experience of improving an article, I realize how important it is to make sure the information you add and the way you present it is in the best interest of the article itself. The stakes feel much higher when citing information for a Wikipedia article than a regular academic paper because of how many people you may misinform because of your mistake. In terms of what I did overall, when starting to improve my article, I really wanted to utilize the features and templates that Wikipedia had to offer because I thought that was the best way besides adding new content to make an article better. What I found that worked the best in improving my article was looking at other Wikipedia pages of topics that are similar to mine to get a feel of how they were formatted, and then using that inspiration to help improve the quality of my article.

When looking at experience with working on Wikipedia and the concepts we’ve covered in class thus far, the concept of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations coincided strongly with my experience. When applying the concept of motivations to how I felt when working on my Wikipedia article, it really made me think about why I became so motivated to do well in improving my article. With Wikipedia offering no extrinsic motivations to contributors, I still found my own intrinsic motivations contributing to primarily to my efforts in improving my article. I think what largely came into play was that I was improving a topic that I genuinely cared about, and since users aren’t forced to improve certain articles, it only makes sense they would choose something they actually care about. Because of only really offering intrinsic forms of motivation to users, I think Wikipedia could improve and cultivate these types of motivations by really driving the importance of people’s contributions and how much of an impact one’s work could have on others. Additionally, realizing how much of an impact one can make on a topic also raised the idea of how much of a negative impact one can make on the Wikipedia platform. While I think Wikipedia already has a fairly solid system in catching trolls and mistakes through the group effort through the feature of watching articles, I think another issue that isn’t quite as sinister as a deliberate troll is the misinformed user and the concept of adherence and knowledge of norms. What I think would be a good idea to implement into Wikipedia would be to include short quizzes given to new users to make sure they truly understand the guidelines and rules of editing Wikipedia articles. It could be argued that implementing a safeguard like this could be too much effort for new users and thus creating a decline in new users. But if done right by gauging the correct level of difficulty and investment required of new users, I think this will only help in informing new users as well as filtering out potential members that aren’t as invested as others.

Overall the experience of improving a Wikipedia article is something I honestly would have never done on my own, but working on this project while learning class concepts has really enabled me to apply these ideas to myself and putting these concepts to the test through my own experience in joining a new online community.