User:Kiyana929/Report

Advice I give to the Wikipedia community is to encourage volunteers to use the “Talk” feature on more articles by making it a task for people who use Wikipedia. They should reward those who give valuable feedback to these volunteers by giving them points on how many articles they comment and read. To be specific, they would earn 5 points for every time they used the “Talk” feature, and once they reached 200 points they would then have more power in being a moderator on Wikipedia just like they do on other platforms such as Slashdot for example. Things that they should add are layout templates for people who want to create a new article. This will give people a base to start their articles, and will force the article to be more organized. An example for this would be like certain species would have a layout format of habitat to life cycle, and then having another layout for a historical figure being time relevance to contributions.

Things I did to the article I edited was to incorporate information that I had learned in my Media Ethics class that I had taken in the previous quarter at the University of Washington. By applying my readings that I had used in that class, I was able to adjust the article to be more comprehensive. The previous article on Communication Ethics only entailed an overview, thus I had a lot more subparagraphs that needed to be inserted. I added the philosophers as context as it gave a foundation to how ethics had first become a crucial topic, therefore led to other findings and pushed more people into caring about ethics of communication. Using my previous class in Media Ethics as a framework, I was able to add more relevant information into the Wiki article.

Through this process learned how to develop an article by incorporating resources that relate to the topic, as well as organizing the information in a way that flows nicely. For Communication Ethics, I had it flow from historical context to modern utilization. However, I did struggle with finding different subtopics that flowed in that order, and not just in a random sequence. I learned how Wikipedia incorporates convenience by linking each article with another related article, so that readers can easily find more information on certain vocabulary that is used. I found how difficult it can be to contribute photos and media into the article without violating copyright laws and plagiarism. I made sure to read the articles entirely and then write a few summarized sentences on different terms, so that I did not go against any of the rules.

Building Successful Online Communities by Robert Kraut and Paul Resnick demonstrates the concept of enhancing intrinsic motivations, in which members of an online community are motivated by successful completion of a task by putting in their own hard efforts. The Wikipedia community has an intrinsic motivation by enhancing different articles, so that they are reached from “start” and “stub” articles to “featured” and “good” articles. This gives volunteers a feeling of accomplishment of adding valuable information to those who want to read about a certain topic. I felt intrinsic motivation when I was editing this article, because I knew that one day someone with the common interest in communication will read what I had researched and wrote.

Kraut states, “In communities such as Wikipedia or the Apache OSS project, which produce a product for external consumption, contributions consist of the direct production work that creates the artifact” (Kraut, pg 21). Meaning, that the community sustains through participant interactions and discussions that further help establish Wikipedia and create more meaningful content. This demonstrates the concepts of how online communities encourage their volunteers to have consistent contributions. Through the utilization of the “Talk” page and peer reviews, I felt more inspired to keep writing on my topic and felt prompted to improve it.

Wikipedia is edited by anyone at any time, and  therefore has the potential to have any article disrupted and changed by others. Anyone could delete my article, which I feel is extreme for a person that puts in time and effort into editing an article. I recommend that people who have edited a certain amount of articles should be the ones that are allowed to take down articles, while others can only edit them. This is a valid recommendation, because in other communities such as Slashdot where moderators have earned points to attain the power to administer what is going on in the community. Incorporating a meta-moderator like Slashdot would allow people to have counter unjust moderating, as all people can have different bias’.

Reflecting on the theories and concepts that we covered in class, I think we found a lot of importance on platforms that incorporate written texts and moderation. A concept that we could have incorporated when we talked about Facebook during week 3 is their commercial content moderation (CCM) and how different media platforms are eager to create inhuman moderation. Another thing to possibly as is the concept of technological determinism and how people are affected by these platforms and are affected by them.