User:Mariana Madera/report

For the Wikipedia project, I chose a stub page on the comedian Adam Ray. At first the page was mostly just of his featured movies and television programs. I soon learned that there wasn’t much out online about this Adam Ray which made it difficult to add to his Wikipedia page with more information. Therefore, my first few steps of the process of improving this article were to first get a feel for who this person was so I watched some YouTube videos and did the classic google search. At this point it was very apparent that online only knew the basics about this born and raised in Seattle, Washington comedian. I then just focused on adding the bit of information that I did find that wasn’t already included in his Wikipedia page and worked on incorporating it to fit the existing paragraph. After I got all the new information I could, I started working on the organization of the page and separating the contents into their own appropriate section of the page. During this process of adding to this Wikipedia page I learned that this Wikipedia community relies on all users. As I was adding to the page some of my work was deleted, or rearranged, you would think that is a bad thing. However, in order for Wikipedia to be as successful as it is, we all as users have to rely on each other in order to produce a successful Wikipedia page. Another thing that I learned is more of an obvious thing but before this project I honestly didn’t know that anyone can contribute to Wikipedia.

Now that I have had the opportunity to contribute to this online community, I do have some advice that I personally think would benefit the overall experience of Wikipedia. First off, I think it would be extremely useful if it was a bit easier to navigate through to find the user’s sandbox and talking pages. I think the Wikipedia foundation could change the layout format when editing to make it easier to follow along. It’s not too big of an issue as I later learned how to navigate my way through it, but it did take me quite a bit to get the hang of it. On the other hand, a piece of advice I have for the Wikipedia community as a whole is that users should be required to say why they deleted a passage, and that reasoning should have to go through a process to get approved and then after it’s approved then passage can be deleted. As of now it is encouraged to explain why you would like to delete but there is no approval process.

During the Norms and Regulations lectures we learned that norms are socially acceptable/appropriate behaviors. My recommendation of there being an approval process for deleting passages would implement the rules of users not to be able to recklessly delete without valid reasoning. This is important because we learned that an absence of clear norms can make a community unfocused or ineffective. Another recommendation I had was to have a different layout/format for when editing to make it easier to navigate through. In chapter five of our course book, Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design talked about the concept of newcomers and it covers the idea of making the design easy for the users to engage with the community site and thereby will increase the likelihood of them joining (Kraut,187). This recommendation should not be taken lightly as we have learned during lecture that online communities will be unavoidably vanish without a constant flow of newcomers.

In conclusion, I was able to tie together what we have been learning during lectures and case discussions and connecting these ideas with my work on the Wikipedia community as a newcomer. This experience overall has been a fun adventure as it was all new to me, but if I were to change one thing about my experience it would be to pick another page to work on. Only for the fact that Adam Ray was a hard persona to find any new information that I could include to his Wikipedia page, so I found it to be a bit difficult to contribute a great amount. Some concepts that were applied through my experience was newcomers, norms and regulation as I mentioned before. And some concepts that weren’t present in my experience was the concepts, commitment and motivation and incentives. Even though my experience/recommendations were more focused on norms and regulations and the concept of newcomers. The other two concepts that I mentioned in the previous sentence play relevant roles in this online community. I enjoyed making contributions to Wikipedia and I believe it is an unique successful online community because of the fact that truly anyone can add content and you don’t have to go through anyone to make these changes which you would think would be very problematic but it actually works out for the most part.