User:Meganshw/Reflection

Wikipedia Reflection Essay
Through the experience of being a contributor, I learned how a page on Wikipedia can take such great amount of effort and time. From searching for information on reliable sources to managing the format and paragraphs, there is much to experience through the process but the most important thing I’ve learned is to be grateful for every page on the site. I have used Wikipedia as a great source of information for my essays, projects, and sometimes even as a dictionary. Being able to have these managed and well-organized information seem to be a norm and I often neglect the fact that they are effort of others. When I struggled with searching for credible sources of information, I felt that I did not appreciate enough before.

Finding reliable sources is a difficult task. Since Live2D is a technology originated from Japan and has little information in English, I had to search in different languages especially in Japanese to get as much information as possible. I added the history part very slowly because most information about the history are comments or opinion articles. I had to look through them and grab specific information such as a release of an app or a software and do searching on them for more reliable sources. Also, it is necessary to filter out contents that are kind of related to the topic, introducing the topic but not going too far. This leads to my opinion about why there is so many stubs. While Wikipedia has three key propositions that help it attract contributors, the number of stubs still increase by time. One reason I can think of is that while it offers low barriers to contribution, since you know your edit will be under strict review and has a possibility to be removed or cause extra work for other editors, people might feel like not causing potential trouble.

To deal with the problem of discouraging new contributors, Wikipedia should Request more effectively, that is to include concrete and realistic goals. There is no clear statement on how much the content should be for a page to not be a sub. Lack of concrete goal may lower people’s interest in helping Stub pages because they don’t know how much effort should be put in. Or, it may hold people from starting to make progress because the goal is unclear and not sure what should be added to the stub page.

Another problem that rise with not having a concrete goal is that since information is always updating, there is probably no end of updating and editing. Unless one person is really into it, editing the same page might lead to boredom as time pass, and people quit. The problem can be solved by Persuasive techniques, listing potential contributions. Every stub page should have “potential related topics (that is not a stub)” so editor can compare the two pages and see what parts can be added. What I feel when working on my draft is that I am unsure whether a piece of information I saw when searching through web is important enough to be on the page.

Another reason that might hold people back is that the work is time consuming. Searching and reviewing through sources to the last page you got on Google search only to add a sentence makes people hesitate about jumping in. One advice I would give is about Intrinsic interest. While people find a topic fun, they might not find editing it fun. Wikipedia can add a space on the talk page for people to share potential useful information for the topic from reliable sources. For example, they just read about an interview about a software’s new release. When an editor comes to improve the page, he or she can review those sources to find useful information. This saves time for searching online and the work is kind of distributed by people’s interest.

What is especially unique about Wikipedia as an online community is that there is little group-level interaction. While editors contribute on a same page and can discuss on talk page, I think the community does not form a sense of belonging or emotional connection, especially bonds-based connection. As a worldwide knowledge-based site, it does not lack users but contributors, and how to encourage newcomers is a challenge to the community. Compare to other online communities that have a need to keep old users, Wikipedia does not necessarily need to do so because information can be found on the web and as long as people are following the rules, the site will work well. To be honest, I probably will not edit on Wikipedia after this assignment because for me it is time consuming. And there are more reasons for others to decide to not start or continue the contribution. Without sense of belong in the community, how to support its contributors is critical for Wikipedia.