User:Kyubei/Reflections

The experience I had with editing Wikipedia has taught me a great deal regarding online communities. Specifically, my experience gave me insight into the way Wikipedia is structured, and why the user to editor ratio is declining for this community. The first and foremost concern I had with adding an article in the first place was simply the question of “what do I write about” seeing as Wikipedia – a digital monster comprised of millions of edits – has articles written on most of the more important or relevant things in the world. This factor of intimidation that I felt – along with many other students – demonstrates precisely why the Wikipedia user to contribution ratio has been steadily decreased over the past few years. This is an issue with motivation – as we’ve learned in class, an individual will do something if the benefits outweigh the costs. However, with less and less topics to write about, users have to go out of their way to find relevant research to write an article, raising the cost and effectively lowering the motivation to join the community. Not only that, but because Wikipedia is a mature community comprised of millions of articles that anybody can contribute to, various rules had to be made and consistently developed in order to keep the community as well as the articles in check – that is to say, within “Wikipedia’s standards”. With Wikipedia being as large as it is, it is seen by many as a reliable resource, so it makes sense that rigid rules and regulations needed to be made to maintain the public image that it had. While having these rules in place helps keep Wikipedia as clean as it is, it comes at a cost – though anybody can join Wikipedia, hardly anybody makes the decision to become an active editor due to the immense amount of intimidation that Wikipedia’s regulations have. These rules are also responsible for a high rate of user turnover, as we learned while talking about newcomers. For example, after publishing my Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns article, in not even one day but after a mere 12 minutes, a lot of the text that I researched for and spent a good deal of time writing was outright removed. It was somewhat demotivating to see a good portion of my work get removed instantly – it was my first article, and rather than receiving a warm welcome or positive recognition of my work, I just get a “Quick rewrite. This article needs some work” comment. Since new contributing users like myself are generally unskilled in creating Wikipedia-perfect articles and have little commitment to the community, when veteran users show up and quickly rewrite or delete parts of our articles with interactions that do not seem too friendly, we can easily see why Wikipedia’s retention rate for new users is quite poor. All in all, over the years, the cost to join Wikipedia has gone up, due to the massive amount of expanding rules on top of the effort required to find something new to write about – and because these costs outweigh the intrinsic motivation that moves most people to contribute to Wikipedia in the first place, we see a decline of the user participation ratio. Although we have seen people attempt to create tools to help welcome newcomers, like the Wikipedia adventure game, these tools have proven to be ineffective. Not only do these tools give a very superficial experience of what Wikipedia is actually like, but they are not part of the formal introduction for new users into Wikipedia and are thus seen by a very small portion of new users to begin with. In the future, unless a majority of veteran Wikipedians make a change to become more friendly and welcoming to new users, we can expect to see the user to contributor ratio for Wikipedia continue to decrease.