User:Michaelajoyce15/reflection

Wikipedia Reflection

Michaela Joyce

I am a member of several communities. Whether the communities are big, small, online, chosen, permanent, forced, or temporary, everyone is a member of at least some type of community. Becoming a member of the Wikipedia community was not something I would have expected or chosen for myself, but after several months as a contributor I am glad to be. As large of a site Wikipedia is, there is little to no newcomer initiation. Wikipedia is a site that would greatly benefit from being more welcoming to newcomers, which would lead to keeping newcomers and making experienced Wikipedians want to give back to the community.

In the introduction to their series, Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World, Christen and Levinson describe how community can be approached from four key angles: affinity, instrumental, primordial and proximate. Affinity refers to membership based on common interests, instrumental refers to shared desire to complete specific goals, primordial refers to membership based on ties of blood, kinship, race ect. Lastly, proximate refers to members who live close to one another in a city, neighborhood, dorm, condo complex, ect. Fisher and Bishop (2015 ), also make a point to discuss how these communities can be on various online platforms and still count as a community. While Wikipedia might fall under the affinity umbrella, it is quite interesting to examine how Wikipedians interact with one another and how they bring in newcomers.

Upon first joining Wikipedia, we completed trainings which gave us some basic Wikipedia knowledge. While we went through these trainings, many Wikipedia newcomers may not go through the trainings. While the trainings gave us some insight into the community, it did little to prepare us for interactions with other Wikipedians. There’s a whole page dedicated to newcomers on Wikipedia. It is titled, “Please do not bite the newcomers” with a picture of a tiger next to it. This page talks about how “we must treat newcomers with kindness and patience…nothing scares potentially valuable contributor away faster than hostility”.

Kraut says that “newcomers can also be a source of innovation, new ideas, and work procedures or other resources that the group needs”. However, why are Wikipedians still hostile and combative to newcomers?

Being a newcomer to Wikipedia I have seen the newcomer push back. Upon attempting to upload a picture, I was immediately shut down. A user, titled @Whpq immediately fired back at me saying that I was “closely paraphrasing” and am not allowed to use this picture. I took in their feedback and attempted again, sure that this time it would work. User @Whpq again was the one to tell me the news of my image being rejected. I followed up with asking for help in a genuine way. I was pleasantly surprised by the users response as they suggested that I can ask them for assistance on their own talk page. However, once Professor Reagle followed up on the inquiry, the user again got defensive and combative. My question is why would someone get offended when they can clearly see a newcomer is asking for help?

While I do not suggest that Wikipedia adopt the newcomer mindset that games such as World of Warcraft has, which requires newcomers to go through a long period of Initation before they can become members (Kraut, 2012). This provides data that allows for existing members to evaluate the newcomers and weed out the least motivated. While this tactic might not work for Wikipedia, according to Aronson, people come to like things for which they suffered because this is the only way they can reconcile their views of themselves as intelligent people with the actions that they have performed (Aronson, 1997).

By being welcoming to newcomers, Wikipedia will foster an encouraging and comforting environment that will cause newcomers to become fully continued contributing members of the community. Wikipedia can do this in a variety of ways. First, they should create a mentorship program where newcomers have the option to opt into a mentor. This would mean that people who actually want to help someone else will be editing and reviewing their work in a positive way. Second, they should revoke the revert tool. @Arjayay was someone who went through my page and checked for grammatical issues .Comparing the "diffs" of the two works showed that another user had a typo and said "on" two times which @Arjayay went back and changed. Then I clicked on Arjayay page and saw a long list with over 1,000 edits just from November and December. This person is clearly an experienced Wikipedian. However, on their page, I saw a number of cases where they made an edit and then that person reverted their changes to how they previously had it. @Arjayay and the person went back and forth reverting each others content, which is just a pointless cycle. Wikipedia says that, “The general rule is: one editor, one account. Do not use multiple accounts to create the illusion of greater support for an issue, to mislead others, to artificially stir up controversy, to aid in disruption, or to circumvent a block. Do not ask your friends to create accounts to support you or anyone else. Multiple accounts are not for collusion, evasion, disruption, or other misuse” (Wikipedia, 2009). I can easily see how a simple reverting war between @Arjayay and the people whose articles it is, can become something much larger if they invite their friends to contribute to the feud. Lastly, Wikipedia should be more clear to their users about citations and rules. Since we are all members of a class, we have had more trainings and learned a significant amount of information about Wikipedia. However, it is still unclear about the policy on citations. I was looking through various articles and some of them have citations after every sentence and some do not. @FeanorStar7 chose to delete some of my citations. This was interesting because shortly after someone else said that I in fact do need the citation!

If Wikipedia prides itself on “people should “be bold” and expect others to be as well. Wikipedia is celebrated as “the product of thousands of editors’ contributions”, each with their own skills. “Even the best article should not be considered complete; each new editor offers new insights about how to further enhance our content”, then why in my case were Wikipedians abruptly deleting content from my page, and even in one case not responding when I inquired as to why?

Despite the lack of newcomer initiation and welcoming, I still felt like I was able to contribute to the community. I peer reviewed classmates pieces, I proofread and made small edits to other Wikipedians articles , and overall, I enjoyed my experience. While I think that other classmates of mine, might not same the same sentiment, I found myself intrigued to learn more about the Wikipedia community. I think that if Wikipedia was more welcoming to newcomers, it would lead to keeping newcomers and making experienced Wikipedians want to give back to the community in meaningful ways.

Karen E. Fisher, Ann P. Bishop, 2015, Information communities: Defining the focus of information service

Kraut et al. ch=5 pp=205-223 (claims 17-25)