User:LisaR2018/Report

Over the course of the last few weeks, I have researched Wikipedia and its online community in relation to other online communities. In particular, I studied the intricate details of online communities such as the benefits and drawbacks of the rules and regulations of such communities, as well as what makes a successful community and an unsuccessful one. In this report, I will evaluate what went well in my Wikipedia experience, and what could be improved on.

Overall, the WikiEd portion of Wikipedia is well done. Because there are hundreds of rules and norms surrounding posting on Wikipedia, having modules that explain the most important rules in a user-friendly format is helpful for getting started. Additionally, the community of Wikipedia is very intrinsically motivated to post on the site, meaning that their motivation to edit on Wikipedia comes from inside of them. These people are successful at creating a community of people with high morals and a desire to create a space to educate people for free. Wikipedia also applies to extrinsic motivators through the barnstar system, meaning that people who do something positive within the community can get a “prize” that can be displayed in their profile. The “barnstar” system is successful because it appeals to the external motivator of paying someone for doing something good with a prize, which motivates people in the community to do good in order to work towards the prize. The balance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivators work together to create a large community of motivated contributors on Wikipedia.

However, throughout my experience using Wikipedia, I feel that there are a few aspects of Wikipedia and its community that the Wikimedia Foundation could consider changing to make a more inviting space for newcomers and to make the community function better as a whole. For example, the aspect that anyone can jump onto Wikipedia and make changes even without having an account helps with the barrier of creating an account to edit Wikipedia, which turns many people and therefore potentially helpful contributions away from editing Wikipedia. However, I would advise Wikipedia to consider requiring people to create accounts to edit on Wikipedia. This is seen in the Jeremy Renner Wikipedia page where a Reddit meme turned into a bunch of people without accounts editing Wikipedia adding in the lead that Renner is a velociraptor. This lead to that site to be protected against new and unregistered users for an indefinite amount of time. In protecting this page, many potentially useful contributions now cannot be added. A lot of this could have been prevented by adding the extra barrier of requiring an account to edit on Wikipedia.

Additionally, I would also recommend that Wikipedia streamlines its sandbox or its editing process to be slightly more restrictive to newcomers to allow them to learn the community norms before giving them the ability to make major edits on popular pages. These restrictions may have the effect of discouraging many potentially useful contributions on Wikipedia, but the benefits could outweigh the downfalls of this solution. In my experience, I found that the WikiEd was useful in teaching me the basics of Wikipedia and how to navigate certain aspects of Wikipedia, however, I still felt that I was given too much freedom on the site knowing very little about Wikipedia. In my case, this level of freedom made me overly cautious of making uninformed mistakes that could accidentally break a community norm and potentially be met with hostility, so much so that had it not been an assignment I would have been deterred from making any edits on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is unique in the sense that it allows anyone to make edits, but in doing so it could also deter “good faith” contributors due to being intimidated from long-time Wikipedia contributors to comply to norms or rules that they may not have been aware about. In creating a “point” system such as the one used on Stack Exchange, it prevents new users from performing certain tasks until they accumulate a certain number of “points,” giving them enough time and ability to learn community norms and rules before allowing them to make more edits or edit larger, more controversial pages.

These changes should be taken into consideration due to a very important factor in the role of all online communities, including Wikipedia, that is retention. Research has shown that the number of editors that have made consistent edits on Wikipedia has begun to decline in recent years, meaning that current newcomers on Wikipedia are less likely to become a consistent part of the community as they were a few years ago. This is happening because as Wikipedia has developed into a more mature site, older community members trust one another but are wary of newcomers who may not know the rules, so they may act hostile towards them. This form of hostility makes retention difficult for Wikipedia, particularly since Wikipedia has dozens of rules that many newcomers may not know about and therefore are likely to accidentally break a rule. This is why I am proposing the “point” system which limits newcomers to certain tasks until they have gathered enough points to be trusted with more tasks. This may hinder the amount of newcomers will join Wikipedia, but it will help with retention as it stops trolls from making edits on articles and it creates an extrinsic motivator to convince people to make more edits on Wikipedia to “climb up the ladder” and gain more points to unlock more privileges.