User:Kimndo/Report

I think the main advice that I would have for the Wikipedia community and the Wikipedia Foundation after having been involved in this platform is that they should implement a mentorship program. This mentorship program would welcome newcomers by walking side by side with them to introduce the platform’s norms and regulations, explore their motivations and incentives, establish a community for them in order to attract their commitment (Kraut and Resnick, 2011). Even though the platform’s norms and regulations are posted and thoroughly addressed during the weekly tasks, I still recommend that the assigned mentor reach out to their mentees about any questions or inquiries since the newcomers might not feel ready to reach out first in the beginning stage. As for helping the newcomers to explore their motivations and incentives, I would suggest the assigned to create interactive activities/polls/quizzes that would allow the assigned mentors and Wikipedia to scale down the choices and make it easier for the newcomers to find connection and interest. To establish community, the assigned mentor could set out more time to personally interact with the newcomers, maybe through a form of live chat or interactive activities and/or to form a bigger community, mentors could create groups for their assigned newcomer mentees who share common interests to interact with one another. An example of this could look like our classroom page, where we can interact with our classmates (through talk pages), look at their work, and provide feedback. To attract commitment, depending on the amount of work and effort that the newcomers have shown or put in, the assigned mentors could maintain their commitment and participation by creating more tasks, goals, or missions that the newcomers would be interested in. A big incentive that could maintain more commitment could be rewards like giving out barnstars or nominating their articles to acknowledge and recognize their contribution.

My experience with Wikipedia was neither straightforward nor a smooth ride, but it was definitely very educational. Within a month and a half, I learned so much about Wikipedia that I never even knew of or thought that I would ever come across the platform and then be able to extract the knowledge, interact with the community, and actually make a contribution to the platform as a final result. I think the weekly tasks (training assignments) were one of the most essential parts that really helped to introduce and guide me through the platform. What makes these weekly tasks great was that they provided key background information and notes about the platform, specific tasks that are required of users, videos, training modules, quizzes, etc. These weekly tasks played a big part in helping me to confidently start tackling the tasks required in a well-established platform built on concrete rules and guidelines. The first part that signaled a start to my Wikipedia journey was the exposure to my sandbox or “my safe, protected space” within this large online community. Right after that, I kind of was struggling with how to use the ‘talk page’ and finding a topic that I could make a substantial contribution to. Figuring out the ‘talk page’ was important because that’s the main form of communication on the platform, which proved to be very handy throughout the course of the assignment. Once I started the editing process for the topic of “Dim Tu Tac” in my sandbox, I learned that editing on Wikipedia, especially through the ‘source editing’ mode was kind of like coding (which took me quite a bit to learn and get used to), but I’m thankful that the ‘visual editing’ exists. Another aspect that allowed me to connect with my fellow classmates within the platform was the peer-reviewing process, which taught me quite a few things and allowed me to go back to reflect and edit my own page in the sandbox. The hardest part about this whole experience was realizing that it’s very difficult to update a stub that simply does not have enough secondary (and reliable) sources, especially with my restaurant topic. This made it super complicated to cite my writing with substantial and reliable secondary sources and to maintain the appropriate tone and neutrality. The most profound thing I learned about Wikipedia is that you’re not supposed to write well, since that usually affects the tone, neutrality, and your position on the topic. Another thing that surprised me was when one Wikipedia user actually found my sandbox article and directly made some edits while leaving some suggestions, which had me questioning the "protection" and safety concept that I was hoping for on this platform. Throughout my whole experience in Wikipedia, the course material’s concept that I would relate to the most is ‘motivation’. I think this is important to address because the only reason that I even stepped foot into getting involved in the Wikipedia community is because of this course requirement. From the start until now, my motivation for this whole assignment was and still is ‘extrinsic’ because I did it for the class and grade. On a bigger scale, my contribution to Wikipedia can be related to Yelp’s users’ motivation (Parikh, 2015) in that just like them, I like to and often go to Wikipedia first to get a good sense of things that I do not know much about. In a sense, I’m like the Yelp users who use Wikipedia for reading about things, but I’m only contributing by editing a topic on Wikipedia because of the extrinsic motivations entailed. To explore more on motivation, I think a user’s motivation can greatly affect and impact a platform’s norms and regulations, the community established, and their ultimate contribution and commitment. As for the norms and regulations, I feel like Wikipedia might give users too much freedom to edit whatever and wherever they want (which is a unique thing about the platform), which I’m curious on whether Wikipedia has full control and capability to turn incorrect contributions around in acceptable time. This freedom that users get could affect their community and fellow editors on the same article that they are working on, which could invalidate the commitment level poured out by the different contributors. With that said, I think Wikipedia can capitalize on building a more connected community that would encourage more effective participation. Lastly, my recommendations should be taken seriously because my involvement and contributions to Wikipedia was also grounded by our class materials and Professor Mako Hill's guidance, instructions, and expertise on Wikipedia, which a new user might not have access to.