User:Mollyanders/Report

Writing a Wikipedia article for the first time was a challenging yet rewarding experience. There were many learning curves but taking this communication class prepared me well as I was able to connect many of my experiences of editing on Wikipedia to what we learned in our course material. One of the connections I made was quantifying a real-life example of Reeds Law. This type of commitment network effect shows how "the utility of large Networks scale exponentially with the size of the network." Because Wikipedia reaches such a massive scope of people, there is basically no room for other online encyclopedia communities to exist on the internet. Wikipedia completely wipes out the competition. Since there is no room for competitors, if you want an online encyclopedia, you have to go to Wikipedia. This solidifies their social proof. Wikipedia has been around for a relatively long time and is extremely well known. It is credible just by being itself. Millions of people know about it and a majority of those individuals trust it enough to get information from it. They were able to curate such a loyal following, that even if you don't know what Wikipedia is, you could still trust it as a website because you had proof of millions of others doing the same. Although I have utilized Wikipedia to get information many times in the past, I have always looked at editing as this untouchable phenomenon. This was mainly because of Wikipedia’s high content standards as well as its strict rules. Wikipedia has found a way to balance descriptive and injunctive norms. Although there are a lot of rules that are blatantly displayed on Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines page, people are also aware of many unsaid norms. The majority of people using the site seem to respect Wikipedia for what it is and therefore keep other community members accountable. A great example of this is how collaborative the editing process is. If you try and edit false information or cite a bad source, a fellow Wikipedian will come and fix your mistake. Wikipedia itself doesn’t have to monitor the surplus of daily edits, the community moderates itself because of people’s willingness to follow the norms and regulations that allow the website to thrive. This is an overall good thing, however, as I have mentioned before, it caused me to be terrified about what I was posting. I know it was inevitable, but I was so scared of another editor coming to my page and yelling at me, I found it really hard to be motivated to edit something. If I wasn’t required to write something for class, I probably would not have participated solely for this reason. I wouldn’t want to step on anyone’s toes or make anyone mad by making a bad edit. How strict the rules were deterred me from contributing anything in the past and will probably deter me from going back in the future without having a professor guide me through the steps. Because of this, I would advise Wikipedia to change their newcomer’s policy in order to have more grace when dealing with good faith rule breakers. Some advice I have for the creators of Wikipedia is to implement a way that people can edit articles without being monitored. Wikipedia has the 'sandbox' concept already but the fact that people can still see your edits, even in your sandbox, counteracts the point of making inevitable mistakes while practicing editing for the first time. When people edited things in my sandbox while I was still in practicing mode, I felt like I was led into a false sense of security. To counteract this, you could use individualized socialization in the individual newcomers. You could offer them unique isolated training and offer a 'sandbox' like place that is completely isolated from the rest of Wikipedia where users could practice contributions within the Wikipedia format but without the judgment of other older users. Then, when they are ready, they could bring it to a secondary practice stage like the current wikipedia sandbox for it to be evaluated. Finally, when they are fully confident and ready to publish, they could then bring it to Wikipedia’s main site. This extra step would create an environment that is more welcoming to newcomers and would place less pressure on those who are contributing. It would also eliminate more good-faith rule breakers. According to our latest lecture, Wikipedia attracted contributors because "it was built around a familiar product, it offered low barriers to contribution, and it offered low attribution and low social ownership of content." However, there is a disconnect between those who edit Wikipedia articles and those who simply read them. Another piece of advice I have for Wikipedia would be to create an environment where more people want to edit and not just read. This imbalanced ratio of those who edit to those who read can be categized as the free-rider problem. A drastic action they can take to avoid the free rider problem is to enact a plan that assures people will contribute. This could manifest in Wikipedia utilizing 'progressive access control' in which readers would only have access to certain things if they positively contributed to the website. For example, the site could make a rule that it would only remain free if enough people contributed to the editing process. This would hopefully motivate people into contributing because the idea of losing free Wikipedia would be more devastating than the cost of editing and therefore people would be more inclined to contribute if it guaranteed that Wikipedia stays free and accessible. By participating in editing Wikipedia pages, I feel like I now have a greater sense of what it takes to be a true Wikipedian. Having a better understanding of Wikipedia is as a website as well as diving deeply into the theory of what it takes to be an online community, I believe I am more equipped to give Wikipedia recommendations on how to improve their sight than the average user.

Mollyanders (talk) 02:46, 11 February 2023 (UTC)