User:Ndurliat/report

Wikipedia Reflection

Noah Durliat

Interpersonal Media

Provide detailed, concrete, and actionable advice to the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation. What should Wikipedia think about doing? What should they think about changing?

One of the things that I believe should be changed is that it should autosave changes to the sandbox. It doesn’t really make sense to me that I have to click on the “Publish Changes” tab when I am only working in my sandbox, not even a live article. I understand that it is a way to keep track of what is being changed at what time, however I personally think it is outdated. Many times I have exited the website without pressing the publish button and all the work is gone, I believe others have gone through this as well. I think that a solution could be maybe auto saving every 5 minutes? And the user would go back after their session and label their contributions if they want to.

Another thing I would consider changing is how the website itself is very bland in terms of color and style. I think it’s too black and white with very minimal color, which can make websites like these very unappealing to younger users. When comparing with other famous websites like Google, there are always splashes of color, while still being able to maintain a sophisticated look. I think wikipedia should consider this and it would improve the users intrinsic motivation to make the site better, instead of viewing it as a boring website in which they only go to look for information for their assignments.

Comment directly on your experience in Wikipedia. What did you do and what did you learn?

In my experience with wikipedia, I looked through stub articles and found one that I wanted to improve. There were many more stubs than I thought existed and was surprised to find out that my future article topic “Gaming chair” was a stub. I thought that it would be easy to find information about this topic, and I own one so it would be interesting. Through Wiki.edu I was able to learn the techniques and processes of making a wikipedia article. I came to learn that it wasn’t one person writing a whole article and that was it. It’s more of a collaboration of so many different types of people who work together to make the information better. There are many tools on Wikipedia for this such as the talk page. After learning how to do things like cite sources, and images, and more I was able to add information to the stub and publish it.

Through this experience, I had to learn how to find a variety of sources and find the information I was looking for as well. I learned that the sources should match the subject. That was important because at first I was looking for scientific articles, but then I realised that it doesn’t fit with gaming chairs at all and it was very hard to find such articles. However, I found hundreds of articles about their rise to popularity, so things turned out okay. Another thing I learned was that images are really hard to use online. I literally had to take a picture of my own gaming chair and upload it to wikipedia. It was almost impossible to find an unlicensed picture, which was really surprising to me.

Connect your experience in Wikipedia explicitly to the concepts in the course material we have covered. Justify your recommendations in terms of the theories and principles we've covered. Why should your recommendations be taken more seriously than just random advice from one new user?

I think the main concept that can apply to my wikipedia assignments is the topic of intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. This experience was interesting because through the class, I was using the website extrinsically. I was doing assignments for a grade and I wanted to do well for my own sake. However, Wikipedia is a website that is mostly run on intrinsic motivation, as people come together to make contributions without pay. They do so for the expansion of knowledge on the platform. I think that my recommendation of improving the look and branding of Wikipedia can increase people to have intrinsic motivation to make Wikipedia a better place. If something is more appealing, then it makes sense for people to want to have a sense of helping or belonging more.

Another key concept that ties into motivation is the retention of new users. I think that a better overall design can help this. More importantly, I believe that Wikipedia does a good job of retaining new users. They have a lot of tools for people to interact and users to see which articles they have contributed to and how they are being changed over time. This naturally brings about a sense of community and belonging. I still believe though, that the layout of the website is a little bit confusing

I think my advice would be taken more seriously because I have had this wikipedia experience within the context of my interpersonal media COM class where we have looked at numerous case studies and analysed them. Wikipedia can be seen as a really big case study project and with knowledge of communication theories and practices, my recommendations might have more depth behind it than just a random new user.

If possible, reflect on what parts of the theories or concepts we covered applied or didn't. You don't have to take everything taught in the course for granted. What would you change or add based on your experience? What is unique or different about Wikipedia?

I think something that we learned that didn’t apply to the Wikipedia project was how to get contributors. We spent a lot of time learning how to get people to contribute, for example increasing motivations, or having a ranking system or whatever. However, with wikipedia, they don’t have to grant different ranks for different amounts of articles. They don’t have to constantly figure out how to keep people engaged, they just come for free. I think something that is unique or different about Wikipedia is that it is a database, and not a cloud like Google Drive. This puts Wikipedia in a limbo zone between being relatively outdated, but still very present in every google search.