User:Madi.heisterman/Report

Having known very little about online communities and how they are developed and strategized before taking this class I feel that my knowledge and understanding has significantly increased. When starting the Wikipedia assignment I was unaware that anyone was able to easily manipulate and edit articles without any membership or verification. In lecture we discussed the importance of getting participation in online communities. I believe that Wikipedia has done a great job at allowing for high participation rates by creating an environment that anyone can edit and contribute to. Wikipedia has strategically created a product with low barriers to contribute, low attribution and low social ownership of content in hopes to get the most out of its viewers and users. It is clear that this has contributed to their success as a community, though it is also an area of weaknesses. When you allow anyone who has access to the internet to manipulate articles in many cases it decreases the quality of work and becomes not as reliable of a source. It is clear that Wikipedia has tried to set up a clear and simple platform to encourage users to participate and edit, though I believe if the program was more user friendly they might find the users to be more intrinsically motivated to contribute. As read in the textbook and seen in the majority of our case studies it is crucial to motivate participation in online communities. Either through persuasive techniques, making contributing more intrinsically interesting or creating external rewards and motives you have to entice the user to want to contribute and feel a part of a community.

Intrinsic motivation is crucial as Wikipedia often can run into the issue of the free rider problem where it is easy to get all the benefits and learn from the articles without any incentives to contribute back. Wikipedia offers little social recognition or rewards to those who are large contributors to the platform. The only recognition Wikipedia gives to its top users are barnstars, which are a mixture of stars awarded to users to show that their work or generosity is being acknowledged. With little incentives and non with monetary value users are unlikely to continue to contribute and help improve articles. If Wikipedia were to introduce a greater reward system they would in turn receive a higher return on readers becoming editors. The rewards system would have to increase with your level of commitment and be based on the quality of your edits. It would be important for it to be based on identity based commitment where the user feels like they are part of a community and want to help it succeed and fulfill its mission. In doing this it would increase the credibility of Wikipedia’s articles and content as those who are currently already big contributors would now have incentives to keep producing more quality work and edits.

When creating an account one must go through a series of training modules that briefly explains the editing process and rules. I found this step to be clear and helpful yet when I went to manipulate the article and create a sandbox I found there were holes in the training modules. I personally found myself turning to youtube, an external site to get clarification for how to properly get set up. It appears that Wikipedia has a great foundation and strong community of contributors but it could use a refresh and a more clear and simple editing process. One area that I found confusing was the sandbox page. The directions to set one up were clear but I then struggled to decipher between the original article and the sandbox finding it easy to get lots between the pages. I also found moving over the article to the sandbox to be unnecessarily difficult between the source and visual editing. I think in this area it would be beneficial for Wikipedia to create a simpler system to transition a page into a sandbox without having to manually copy and paste and create new URLs. In doing this it would increase the users intrinsic interests as it would increase user satisfaction and happiness while decreasing the clutter and unnecessary steps.

Throughout this process of learning more in-depth the steps that go into forming successful online communities I have learned the importance of user participation and motivation. In the future I hope to work in marketing and with online communities through media, so the course material so far has been very intriguing to me. I know that the concepts we have been covering will apply and be useful in my future career. This has caused me to want to dive deeper into the concepts and really understand how to apply the material to the real world and in online communities.

I found it challenging at first and struggled to get a hold of some of the tasks in Wikipedia. Once I was able to grasp the working of the program I really enjoyed the experience of taking an article and going through the steps of improving it and analyzing other student's work to help improve multiple live articles. I think Wikipedia is really unique in the sense that anyone is able to become an editor and create content accessible to anyone in the world. Though the articles are supposed to be non bias and have credible sources Wikipedia has created a space with norms unlike most online platforms. As seen in lecture and the text book Wikipedia has a range of norms to allow for a range of behaviours and creative styles to accommodate most of its users. Similar to most online communities at first Wikipedia was daunting with the Wiki education training and extensive rules. Once you dive deeper and get oriented with the cite you realize it allows for a lot of freedom and encourages users to use good faith and neutrality while also encouraging users to be bold.