User:Nathan Yu 2023/Report

Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world, and it is the biggest information website. Imagine all the information and everything around the world coming from one website, how heavy the responsibility is? They have no workers and we know everyone has the right to edit the website. The website provides mediocre information at a low cost. This drives competitors out of business, reduces diversity, and lowers the standards all across the board. Since that, I think the quality of articles is the main point that props up Wikipedia. In my opinion, there are three points that are essential to have quality content: Editors themselves, motivation, and commitment.

For editors, I think the first ideal norm should be the person “must” have passion, interests, and professional knowledge for the content they are contributing. In my experience through making the content for a tourist attraction in my hometown, I don’t think I have that much professional knowledge and detailed information, a little bit of passion and interest only because I have little relationship with it. Due to incomplete motivation, the outcome is hard to be good or perfect. My point and perspective might be biased or partial without realizing it. For the second point of editors, I think they should set a minimum requirement for editors such as their writing ability and educational level. I think this requirement can filter out some of the low-quality content to appear. For the third point of editors, I think they might can invite the field-relevant people to do the specific content within their knowledge. Since they are professionals in their field, they can provide better quality content in their topics and articles. However, there will be another problem comes out, if we let them write the content about themself, they might put biased information into it without letting us know, in order to achieve their goals.

For motivation, I think Wikipedia should encourage the editors and users more in order to let them feel their passion is valuable and to let them have more engagement. Through my experience of contributing to Wikipedia, I feel lonely and have no encouragement. I put effort into it and it shows published successfully in the end without any gratitude such as thank you for your contribution. This gives me a little sad mood and also other editors or supervisors are also going to delete or edit my work by themselves. I hope Wikipedia can add a few things to encourage the editors, in order to let them feel their passion and efforts are valuable.

For commitment, I think Wikipedia should let those high-quality editors feel they are valuable, and let them feel they belong in this place. Once editors feel a sense of belonging and commitment, they are more likely to put more effort and passion into it, in order to rise the quality of Wikipedia. So I think Wikipedia should award or thank those editors who provided high-quality content, in order to keep them here and make more valuable contributions.

In the end, as Wikipedia’s users and readers, I think we should treat Wikipedia as an informative website instead of an encyclopedia. We can look for information for curiosity, but we can not fully trust or rely on it.