User:Mobyoctopad44/reflection

When Professor Reagle initially told us we were going to be learning to use and contribute to Wikipedia, I felt intimidated and scared. I am not particularly active in online communities other than more mainstream social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. I am also, for someone my age, quite incompetent with technology. Just the other day, I struggled to insert an image into a Google doc. However, Wikipedia is inarguably the most popular wiki on the internet, and I have been using it as a reader for as long as I can remember, so I was determined to conquer it. I developed and published an article for the Austrian designer Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill and made edits to other articles, all the while interacting with other Wikipedians. I will reflect on my experience as a newbie to Wikipedia, discussing some of the challenges I faced and the benefits I came across throughout my time on the website. Ultimately, I will argue that despite the initial intimidation and learning curve, Wikipedia offers a unique opportunity for users to engage in a collaborative, democratic process of knowledge production that is both rewarding and valuable.

At first glance, Wikipedia presents an overwhelming interface for newcomers who are not coders because of its archaic open-source appearance. This can be a discouraging factor for those considering making contributions to the platform, as it looks less accessible than it really is. However, I was pleasantly surprised with how organized the website is to integrate its newcomers. When you create an account, you are immediately met with extensive tutorials and training that range from basic coding grammar to in-depth editing lessons. This way, newcomers may feel less overstimulated by the endless possibilities of edits to make and overcome the illusory difficulty of Wikipedia’s specific language. I also personally found it reassuring that the training encourages users to start with small exercises like proofreading and copyediting to help ease them into the interface, before increasing the difficulty of suggested articles to edit. The Wikiedu dashboard was also a helpful resource for finding useful pages, like the Sandbox, more easily.

When I overcame my initial discomfort with the website’s interface, I came to understand the great advantages of Wikipedia’s organization. For instance, the open-source approach to the documentation of all activity on all pages is very useful, especially when using Wikipedia in an academic context. Reagle (2010) explains that the easy documentation of actions helps with the preservation and evolution of the interface, as users can refer to past mistakes to avoid repeating them. This is also a helpful tool in keeping users accountable for their contributions, essentially leaving a paper trail of all edits made for users to refer to both when collaborating on an article and when viewing a user’s contribution history. The ability to view the edit history and compare versions of an article eases the process of editing productively, without just repeating past reverted edits.

After finishing the first version of my article in the sandbox and moving it to the mainspace, I had a bit of a fear that no one would see it, and that all would have been for nothing. Perhaps this is because I am used to the algorithms of social media platforms on which one only usually comes across content from either those they follow or people who have online social capital. I was, once again pleasantly surprised. Wikipedians almost immediately found my article somehow and began to make edits, all of them welcome. I was happy that users genuinely wanted to contribute to my article, even though they do not know me at all and I am a newbie to the Wikipedia community. I felt warmly welcomed by their edits. I couldn’t help but think of Aronson & Mills (1959), who found that newcomers who undergo a severe initiation grow more fond of the groups they joined than those who go through a mild initiation because they feel a need to reconcile their views with the pain or labor they have been through. Because my motivation to join was rather low, to begin with, I don’t think a more intense initiation to Wikipedia would have been worth it for me, though perhaps it would have made me like it more in the long run.

I was proud of the article I wrote; I did extensive research and thus felt equipped to write about the subject of Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill, so I would have not been satisfied to be met with skepticism or rejection, even by more experienced users. However, as it turns out, one does not have to prove themselves on Wikipedia in any other way than the quality of their contributions (and general civility). Most of the edits made to my article were minor: user Onel5969 added a short description to the top of the article, user FromCzech made some grammatical edits and checked my citations, and user Bearcat added some categories to the page. Nonetheless, they were helpful, and I found myself more motivated to continue embellishing the article, and even to make better contributions to others’ articles. Zhu et al. (2013) found that on Wikipedia, receiving feedback from other users has positive effects on users’ motivation to continue to contribute to the platform, and particularly on newcomers. I did not receive much verbal feedback other than from my peer reviewer, user NUstudent1316, who had kind and encouraging words to say about my article. Still, their feedback and the edits made by other users provided me with a renewed sense of purpose. I believe that if no one had seen my article, I would have felt as though my labor had been useless and thus not be motivated to continue improving it.

You may have noticed that I keep referring to the article on Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill as “my” article. That is because it is mine; I wrote it. But it is not mine; it belongs to everyone. I developed a peculiar sense of ownership over the article, particularly since the page had not existed before I created it, and I did a lot of research to build it up. Perhaps this is by force of habit; in any other setting, such as school, the work I turn in is indisputably mine. As someone who has never been a part of a collaborative knowledge-sharing community such as Wikipedia, I find it incredibly difficult not to feel ownership over the article I wrote and entitlement over what happens to it in the future. Nonetheless, it is not mine and it is subject to change in the future, and I have no control over it.

I get the sense that most articles on Wikipedia are also created this way; one user will create the page and write the bulk of it, and then other users will come along and edit it, add to it, or remove from it, and as a user who has agreed to the rules of the platform, you must come to terms with that fact. I cannot imagine writing an entire research paper and then publishing it, only to have strangers start moving things around, or even delete it. Additionally, your name is never on your work, even though you did all of it. That is what the mainspace felt like to me. Thankfully, the edits made to my article by users such as FromCzech and Bearcat were minor, noninvasive, and generally helpful. User JonNotJohn, on the other hand, had all of their additions on their chosen article ripped to shreds by other users, and eventually deleted. I know for a fact that that would have made me feel disrespected and upset. I assume it would have had the opposite effect of feedback and demolished my motivation to continue contributing to Wikipedia.

However, for the most part, I understood Wikipedians’ sense of community and collaboration on the interface’s talk pages. Professor Reagle advised us to send “thanks” notes to the users who contributed to our articles after having published them, because thanking others increases pro-social behaviors and can help to foster long-lasting collaborative relationships. I did so, but I wanted to express my gratitude more formally to the users who helped me the most, because the “thanks” button feels too automated to sincerely get the message across. I went on two users’ talk pages, FromCzech and Bearcat, and published longer messages on their wall. I was impressed with how active those talk pages are, reflecting how active they are on the website. FromCzech, for example, is what can be considered a WikiAdult, and has an incredibly developed talk page where they often receive messages from other users. They have been active since 2019, focusing on contributing to articles about people or things from the Czech Republic (they must have found mine through my mention of Karlovy Vary) and have received dozens of messages and a few Barnstars since. The other users are mostly also thanking them for their contributions. One particular user, who is also interested in all things Czech, extended an “olive branch” to FromCzech to acknowledge and overcome past debates they had had whilst collaborating on some articles. I was impressed by their ability to display such diplomacy and maturity to a total stranger after an internet feud, but they are no exception.

As I came to realize, most other experienced Wikipedians show similar levels of fairness, thus illustrating the “assume good faith” and “assume the assumption of good faith” pillars of Wikipedia collaboration. Users value their community and its reigning peace, and it seems that they understand their responsibility to maintain it that way. There is, of course, still drama on Wikipedia but it is a necessary part of the process of collaboration, and those who are more belligerent face consequences pretty quickly. There is no other platform on which I have witnessed such thoughtfulness and tact from active users; it truly seems as though Wikipedia and its users are committed to being a positive influence on others, and thus represent a successful haven for its users, both old and new. In this way, it matches the criteria for the influence component of McMillan and Chavis’s definition of community quite well; features like talk pages for open discussion amongst users, and the ability to thank others, have the power to make users feel as though they matter in the community, and help to make a difference through their contributions. Mobyoctopad44 (talk) 20:20, 10 April 2023 (UTC)