User:MArtin9712/Report

In my daily life, I have a lot of experience of using wikipedia. It helped me a lot by giving me a basic idea of many things and concepts. But I have never thought about who are the contributors and how the community of contributors is formed. And I had never dared to think about being a wikipedia contributor. By completing this project, it gives me a glance of how the online community is formed and shows me how to be a Wikipedia contributor in a very clear way. I had learned a lot through editing the Wikipedia article and the situations I encountered during the process also reflected what we have talked about in the course material. Otherwise, although this community works in a positive way, there still are some changes I think could make the community even better.

This experience actually is my first time joining an online community. As a whole, I had a good time contributing, although there are so many rules and the community structure is not so easy to understand. Before we started editing, we put a lot of efforts on learning the norms of the Wikipedia community. The norms on copyright and language in Wikipedia are more complicated than what I had encountered in my daily life. In the Wikipedia article, every paragraph needs a reliable source, and academic sources are prefered. Because Wikipedia articles are not owned by anyone, so there could not be any other people’s work and even paraphrasing is not permitted. We must write using other people’s content in a totally reconstructed way. The usage of language in Wikipedia requires a formal and neutral tone. English is my second language, so I need to be more careful to deal with my language to avoid breaking those norms. For uploading pictures, it also needs contributors to put the copyright issue on mind. We are only allowed to use pictures not owned by anyone or pictures we took by ourselves. It also took me some time to find the Chinese snack Mahua that my article is about for uploading the picture. Thus, Wikipedia’s strict norms on copyright actually gives me good practice on using language neutrally and dealing with information found in other people’s work. Another thing that I have learned from doing this project is finding a good resource in Wikipedia. As I said, now I have learned most of the information in Wikipedia could be traced back to a reliable source, so I can easily find a reliable source in the reference section of the article in the future. Most impressively, by doing this project, I have personally felt a sense of connection and reciprocity in the online community we have mentioned in class. After I moved my article to the real article page, there was another contributor who helped me fix some part of my grammar. It lets me know there are some people who are looking at my work and some helping me fix it, and I felt all of my work was worth it. Although there was not much communication between us, I still feel the connection between other contributors and me. It even gave me the passion to write more on Wikipedia.

Although there are a lot of great and fun things by editing Wikipedia articles, there are still two suggestions that I want to make on Wikipedia to make the community better.

The first advice is adding an identity-based small group forum, which is not bigger than 50 people, on Wikipedia. Only Journeyman editor and people who got a higher award could be invited to the forum group. From my experience of editing, I choose the topic because it is my hometown’s famous snack. I am familiar with it and I want to present it to this world in a more clear way. I believe most of the contributors write about what they are good at or familiar with, for either type, they must have a strong connection with the topic. People who edit the same topic must have a similar identity regarding the topic and most of the time they share a similar goal. Like other editors and me who write about my hometown’s things and foods, all of us may share a sense of presenting my hometown in a more clear way. Thus, if Wikipedia put them in this same forum, they can work together and help each other for their goals. In class, we have talked about having smaller communities could make people more motivated, so I think the size of the forum should not be more than 50 people. Under 50 people, the size of forum participants could depend on the notability of the topic. Setting a threshold of Journeyman editor can make sure participants are experienced and on a similar knowledge base about Wikipedia editing. Thus, I think adding an identity-based small group forum could make the Wikipedia community more productive.

The second advice I want to make is restricting non logged-in users to contribute and adding a mandatory basic training section for every user. In class, we talked about too many people breaking norms would demotivate some community members. Untrained users and non logged-in users could break the norms mistakenly easily. Also, a lot of people would not spend time going over every norm of Wikipedia. So this training could make sure every user has a sense of how Wikipedia works. By adding this section, it prevents people from breaking the norm and keeps people more motivated.

Overall, it is a great experience to learn about and join the community of Wikipedia. I am excited and ready to contribute more on wikipedia in the future.