User:KamanaMS/WikipediaEval

Wikipedia Experience:
As a new user to Wikipedia, the WikiEducation dashboard served as a helpful resource to understand how to use the platform and specifically work with the idiosyncrasies of Wikipedia. From my limited use of other online communities, Wikipedia seemed to be less intuitive. This might be because as uninvolved users, I consume Wikipedia from the front end, reading articles etc. For an online community like Twitter etc. the “community” aspect is more evident and up front than on Wikipedia where the evidence of a community aspect becomes clear only if you know ho to find the “talk” page. In many ways, working on Wikipedia reminded me of doing work on the back-end of a Wordpress site.

While the experience of using Wikipedia as a student allows for many hand-held opportunities for support through the WikiEducation dashboard, the Wikipedia community might have barriers to entry for people who do not have the coding expertise required of the platform. Many of Wikipedia’s communication features felt counter-intuitive and inaccessible to someone who hasn’t yet learned the Wikipedia language. While this might be specific to me, I felt a certain level of nervousness every week, logging on to complete assignments in Wikipedia because I found the structure of the platform somewhat foreign and hard to use.

What I appreciated about Wikipedia was the clearly laid out ground rules and the orientation process provided by WikiEducation, which made sure to emphasize community norms. These norms emphasized a code of conduct between users and a detailed scope of content that makes it clear that community members should only participate if they are dedicated to creating quality content. These norms also make it clear that community members are motivated by the desire to edit and contribute content, not simply to be a by-stander. By designing talk pages to show all the discussions across various users also helped to create a community culture of transparency and honesty that is beneficial when creating the kind of educational and public material for which Wikipedia is known.

Main Critiques:
Considering my experiences, my critiques fall into the following categories. I will elaborate on these in the upcoming section.

1)     Creating a more streamlined way for newcomers to interact with the platform.

''a. Accessibility:'' Even with the help of WikiEducation, the WikiEdu dashboard looks vastly different from what a regular user is working with on Wikipedia. The vast difference in formats between the two facets of Wikipedia we were working with has the potential to feel confusing. With people like me – who may have visual impairment issues – the design of Wikipedia itself can be off-putting. It may be helpful to design Wikipedia to be more accessibility friendly, which would also increase commitment from newcomers who may want to contribute but feel the platform cumbersome to use.

''b. Ensuring commitment and motivation:'' While Wikipedia may have awards based on contributions, the terms of commitment and motivation should be clearly laid out when someone joins. Because of what I perceived as a clunky user interphase, I felt hesitant and demotivated from coming back to the platform out of a sheer nervousness of dealing with the visual onslaught of information when logging into Wikipedia.

2)     A more fool-proof method to keep track of communications.

''a. Ease of cross-user engagement:'' A chat interphase that mimics messaging apps would be helpful, even if it is redundant with conversations in a Talk page. This would allow the user to access all communications in one place rather than having to toggle between talk pages a various tabs.

Recommendations:
1)      Creating a more streamlined way for newcomers to interact with the platform

Accessibility and Inclusive Design

I’m approaching this critique first and foremost from the vantage point of someone with a vision impairment. My bias is responsive to content and a user experience that appears cluttered, visually cramped and in general makes me feel scattered and unable to focus on the important material. The use of black text and blue hyperlinked text only, and everything being in the same colors against a white/ gray backdrop makes it hard to immediately find tabs and important icons.

As a newcomer, and as someone who likes to learn and share knowledge, I have the intrinsic motivation to become involved in Wikipedia. However, the design of Wikipedia in conjunction with my vision issues and preferences, subconsciously made me nervous to log in week after week; I was afraid of having to navigate what I thought of as a confusing design.

The utility model of motivation states that “an individual will do something if the benefits to the individual outweighs the cost to them.” The confusing/clunk design of Wikipedia might be perceived to some as a cost, that affects their ability to process the information on the page and navigate through the community. This may be a cost that outweighs the benefits of being part of the community and contributing.

I would suggest creating a better way to “wayfind” through Wikipedia. Perhaps choosing different fonts and colors, and thinking about the spacing of lists and menus can help users scan pages and interact better with the platform. Consider an accessibility audit of Wikipedia, working with UX designers who understand inclusive design.

Commitment and Motivation

All of the aforementioned adjustments would create a “immersive social environment with clear, sincere, performance feedback.” Ultimately I believe this will allow for making tasks more “intrinsically” meaningful. If people enjoy using an interphase, they will come back to it. A good example is Zooniverse, which has very low barriers to getting involved and also has an easy-to-use interphase for users to get involved.

2)      A more fool-proof method to keep track of communications with other users.

Unlike some other online communities, where the primary use of the community is to interact with users, Wikipedia broader purpose is to create encyclopedic content which is more unidirectional. While a user created content for an audience, there is user to user interaction, however the mechanisms that allow for dialogue and conversation felt disjointed and hard to find.

The talk pages were helpful in keeping track of discussions that took place about a specific article. However, a user may feel confused and scattered between communications happening on different pages and communications happening on their own talk page. In addition, the format of conversations and having to read through the whole comment before knowing who added the correspondence to the talk page is a lot for one person to keep track of on their own. The cost of feeling scattered and having to take the energy to parse through communications might outweigh the benefits of engaging in community-centered activities for some users.

My suggestion would be to create a chat system that mimics the messaging interphases on other apps, whether that be WA, Facebook, or Instagram and Twitter Direct Messages for example. These platforms follow a chat mechanism that has become familiar to users and when a newcomer joins Wikipedia, the exosystemic effect of already being familiar with the chat mechanism will motivate users to contribute.

This messaging system or inbox could be redundant and could even aggregate all conversations and talk pages in a which a user is active and participates. If they respond to a thread in the chat, it will automatically show up on the talk page. This also removes the step of having to go to talk pages to input a new comment or correspondence and might increase motivation to converse and engage more directly with other users.