User:Letian88886/reflection

Latest Vision:GPU mining

First vision and latest vision: Special:Diff/1216316772/1211373709

This learning journey is an initiation process for me as a newcomer to the Wikipedia community, through which I grasped how to contribute to the community as per its rules and practices and learned about the overall governance of online communities.

For any online community, the management of newcomers is critically important. In addition to recruiting newcomers, the initiation process needs to prepare them well for what is expected out of them. A formalized initiation is important, but it is also equally important to consider initiation as an ongoing process continuing throughout the newcomers’ acting within the online community. To render this ongoing initiation possible, documenting and sharing are very important. As suggested by Reagle (2015), documenting and sharing not only allow “community members to have more engaging interactions” but also allows for “the collaborative accumulation of many people’s contributions.” Such was the feature of Wikipedia I liked the most and also used the most during my initiation. For example, the QICs I have done allowed me to share and exchange ideas with my classmates, while also get familiar with the basic features of the community by using the blue links provided everywhere within the page. As I posted and replied to my peers on this page, I was acting as per the community’s rules and best practices, making these rules and practices prominent.

I learned to apply this documenting and sharing procedures when I created my own Wikipedia page and revised it on February 28 Special:Diff/1210895547&oldid=1210894614, where I used embedded citation system of Wikipedia to provide citation links for my sources and also add a link for the word “cryptocurrency” that redirected to the Wikipedia article page specifically on this term. Later, when interacting with others on my article, I further learned about some semi-automatic functions on Wikipedia: OABOT(diff=1211980954&oldid=1211418263), Citation Bot(Special:Diff/1210905162&oldid=1210894002), and Anomie BOT. I was able to track the history of revisions because Wikipedia provided a detailed documentation of all the historical changes made to my article.

This documentation process serves for the purpose of content moderation as well, since each user involved can clearly see what alterations are made by whom. As I suggested in my February 23 QIC on moderation, such mutual check might be a good way to moderate online content. Automated content moderation has the many risks innate in digital technologies like the tendency to repeat biases (Gillespie, 2020 ), while recruiting moderating staff to monitor all the contents is obviously unfeasible. Furthermore, centralized and professional moderators could be impacted by biases in their judgements or decisions as well. A successful moderation, as such, is not merely reliant upon one or several moderation practices, but comes from the entire system of the online community that encourages pro-community behaviors and discourage anti-community behaviors.

To summarize, learning throughout this class is not only an initiation process that prepares me to be a qualified and responsible editor in the Wikipedia community, but also informs me the best practices of designing and governing online communities. As I shared ideas with my peers in QICs, I participated in the learning of the community rules, norms, and practices, and contributed my views to building a more harmonious and successful online community. Meanwhile, by creating my own Wikipedia article page, editing, and reviewing the revisions made by my peers, I joined in the free sharing of knowledge and the moderation of contents. With this experience, I am now more confident with my navigating through other online communities in the future.