User:MBlairMartin/Report

COM 597 A : Building Successful Online COmmunities
My article on Inez Scott Ryburg is an article, as an experienced Wikipedia editor, is a c-class article in terms of amount of information, but a start class article in terms of content in my opinion. While the article has 15+ references, a lot of those are references to Ryburgs publications. These references, while showing the notability of the subject, do not add much to the body of the article. Unfortunately, there were not many bibliographic sources to add to the body of the article and in turn this lead to the article relying heavily on one main source for content. This is not ideal, but in the case of Ryburg, it does work. I would have liked to find more sources, even citing the same information, to give different citations for further research. Because of the limited bibliographic sources the article, it reads quite choppy. I think will some addition sources, some gaps could be filled in, without too much information being taken from one source. Being that it was a bibliographic article of a deceased person; it will be harder to expand the article because no new bibliographic information is being published. However new ideas and reviews may be written about Ryburgs published works.

The second article I wrote, Speed Rack, I believe is more cohesive and it does involve more diverse sources. This is a result of the event being an ongoing competition, therefore new News articles come out every year in conjunction. There was a wealth of sources to look thorough and I did not use all of them, but only being mentioned in News articles is also detrimental as a lot of the news sources copied the original verbatim and re-posted the information on their own site.

It is difficult to relate the Wikipedia experience I had in this class to that of a new user because I was already on Wikipedia. I believe, based on my experience on Wikipedia, that being a first-time editor and enrolled in any class associated with Wikipedia is exponentially helpful. You are automatically welcomed and given a link to a forum where you can ask questions, find out information, or ask for help. There is also a banner placed on our talk pages that states we are editing for a course, and what course it is with a link to the education page. In my opinion this stops experienced users from undoing edits, marking pages for deletion or other negative actions, and instead marks the user as a new editor causing the experienced editor to reach out a discuss what might have been an incorrect edit.

As an independent user, it took me 2 days to be invited to the teahouse, and 3 weeks to get my welcome message to Wikipedia. I understand that it is much harder to monitor new individual users, versus a class who all sign up at the same time, and to welcome everyone. There must be some way, probably a bot, to automatically post on new users talk page to get this information out there right away.

My experience is probably much different than most, in the fact that I was hired for an internship by a museum and my job was to edit Wikipedia. I started my first day by studying Wikipedia and started editing shortly after, working 8 hours a day, I had spent about 20 hours editing before I ever received a notice of where to find help. My first interaction with another user on Wikipedia was negative, and I continued to have issues with certain users throughout my internship. If it were not for my job, and I was a casual editor I don’t know that I would have continued editing. There are various manuals on Wikipedia about how to edit Wikipedia, and as a first-time user I read some of them, but not all. There is SO much information that as a new user it is overwhelming to be bombarded with information about how to edit, when some of the information won’t make any sense until you have started to edit.

I believe that most people come to Wikipedia because they have something in mind to edit, but one of the big problems we have been talking about is new user retention. I decided to stay and continue to edit because I got invited to Women in Red, a group which works to turn Women, or articles related to women from a Red link to an article. This is just one of many groups on Wikipedia that hold multiple edit-a-thons. Women in Red holds a monthly edit-a-thon with different themes, and lists of red links to be created. To keep new users continually editing these types of groups are very important, it gives a list of requested articles as well as at least one source for each item. I was not invited to this group until 2 months after I started editing, for most new editors this is probably too late to entice them to stay. The biggest issue I see with retaining new users to Wikipedia is timing. It took me months to garner support and help from the existing Wikipedia community which did not make me feel included early enough. Being in a job I had no choice but to stay and continue editing. This is not something that new users should be feeling, and hinders user retention. By not only welcoming new users, pointing them to where they can find help and ask questions, but also giving them options to new articles to edit, I believe they are more likely to continue in the community. These welcoming items need to happen as quickly as possible, as it is likely that some users may make their edits and finish with Wikipedia within a few hours or days. This doesn’t leave much time to make new users feel included and increase user retention.