User:Lydialzy/Report

People join the Wikipedia community because Wikipedia meets their needs. People can get information from Wikipedia. And also when they see the article has some problems, they can edit the article. Giving people a chance to edit articles is a feature of Wikipedia. This is how Wikipedia makes people norm their community. They give people a chance to help other people. In the Wikipedia community, most people will help others because they get other people's help from the community so they want to help others too. This is how Wikipedia is doing well because it allows everyone to make them want to give back to this community. This is my first time editing an article on Wikipedia. After I finished editing the article, I knew how hard it was. And I always get different information from Wikipedia, this makes me want to edit articles on Wikipedia if I see some article that needs to improve and I can do it. The things that I get from Wikipedia are helpful, and I know how hard it is to finish the article, so I will keep staying in the community to help others who like me.

However, there are many Wikipedia-like sites on different platforms that can provide people with information. This will result in very few people staying on Wikipedia because, to compete, many platforms have proposed many different reward mechanisms to attract people to participate in the community. Wikipedia needs to improve to keep more people in their community. We know when a person does something, the personal benefit outweighs the cost to them, and they will do it. I think this is people’s motivation to join the community. According to people’s motivation, I think people choose to stay on Wikipedia because they get the benefit that the information helps them when they need help. To make the users stay in the Wikipedia community longer, Wikipedia needs to find some new benefits for people who edit articles and provide information in the community. Because giving back to others takes a lot of time and doesn't get much, it means that everyone will give more than they will gain. For so long, people get tired and want to quit the community. They should consider giving some nice rewards to users who help them edit articles and provide information. Wikipedia can add the function called “Like”. Each article has a like section, and if the reader thinks the article is helpful they can like the article section. Then the section editor can get some points. When they accumulate certain points they can convert those points into money. Using this incentive mechanism can attract people's attention and continue to stay in this community to help others. It also can reduce users' transfer to other platforms. If people get enough benefits, they will start to give back to the community. Otherwise, they will leave. They feel that there is no point in staying there because they are not getting anything.

Also, the Wikipedia community can try to give the community member some community “assets” like a group of community friends who have the same interests can always talk together. And they can always share information and their knowledge with each other. To suggest giving community members some “assets” because there is a variant called lock-in demand-based commitments that allow members as they accumulate community-specific assets that retain their value only through continued participation in the community. “Assert” can keep community members stay and continue to give back to the community because if they leave, the assets they have accumulated in the community cannot be taken away which means that everything they have done before is wasted. Everyone will understand and know how to maximize their interests. When old users have a certain amount of “assets”, they will choose to continue to stay. Giving users community "assets" can make members can't be separated from the community. My experience with Wikipedia is that I edited an article and added some details that weren't there before. I learned how strict Wikipedia is on reference links because many links in Wikipedia are not reliable. Learning how to find reliable references and use them in articles is a good learning opportunity that Wikipedia gives me. But this also has a downside. There are few reference materials for some topics, and some good sources cannot be found, which will reduce users' editing on some topics. Because it will make the user spend more time completing an edit and reading a large piece of text to confirm which sources are reliable. So Wikipedia's references on some topics can be slightly less restrictive, allowing users to use some of the references they find. This will make them not need to spend more time. Because when people are in the community, if they don't get a lot of returns, they will not spend more. At least they won't let themselves spend more than they payback.

Based on my own experience this time, I may stay in the Wikipedia community to help people in the short term because I got some help from them in the beginning. But after a long time, I may opt-out because it takes a lot of time to spend on it and I don't get the same or get less than what I paid for. I don't want to stop at something that doesn't help me a lot, it's a waste of time. For the past few weeks, I've been spending time on Wikipedia and doing research. I already know a bit about this community, so my advice should be taken more seriously than random advice from a new user. I make suggestions to this community based on my own experience. Because this community brings what I want, I hope my suggestion can help the Wikipedia community attract more new users to use and keep old users in the community after improvement.