User:Noienoah/Report

Writing my first Wikipedia article from a stub was a new experience for me. Although I have been part of different online text-based communities in the past, I had never ventured into the realm of Wikipedia. Improving the encyclopedic information of the 1977 NBA All-Star Game was not only interesting, but proved to be quite entertaining as I gathered more information for the article. I learned how to become an contributor to a greater knowledge-base on a global scale. While the experience of seeing my completed work published to such a renowned community was very fulfilling, there also are some things that Wikipedia should streamline and improve in their process of training new contributors. However, they are also doing many things right which is why Wikipedia has been such a successful online community for such a long time.

The learning process to be able to meaningfully contribute to Wikipedia was streamlined and not difficult to pick up. The tutorials prepared me quickly and effectively on how to create and improve my article. I learned how to write in a neutral, academic tone. I learned how to format text and insert images on Wikipedia. Overall, I learned how to create an encyclopedic body of text, capable of educating someone else on a given subject, in my case the 1977 NBA All-Star Game. While Wikipedia's tutorial instructed me on how to complete this task, I felt that it failed to instruct me on how to include other components of many Wikipedia articles such as editing information tables and referencing & sourcing lists at the bottom of each article. So much of Wikipedia, in these areas is not congruent, and changes from contributor to contributor. I ran into this in my article, as the person who had created the stub lacked proper sourcing and intext citation, however I did not know my course of action as no standard seemed to exist. Additionally, I wanted to add a table with information that needed to be cited, however I did not know how to do either of these things based on the instruction given in the tutorials. (Kaylea helped me out!) Having a helper available when I ran into niche problems such as non-congruent sourcing lists would be a huge help, something that Wikipedia could provide, and many other websites do already in order to support users. I can not imagine contributing for the first time without the support of Kaylea and Mako's videos.

Overall, I think that Wikipedia can improve upon the accessibility of learning resources and rules associated with them. Having these resources listed out instead of having the need to be back into the tutorials would greatly increase the speed at which I can contribute. The less time I spend figuring out how to do something and which rules I have to watch out for, the more time I spend contributing. Another improvement would be a streamlined list of rules & guidelines. The list right now is in Wikipedia article format and is quite extensive. Making it shorter and more concise would allow editors to quickly reference rules, and would prevent confusion. A problem I ran into was limited access to applicable images for my article. A vast expansion of the Wikipedia commons image database would greatly improve the overall content of articles. This is especially prevalent as society becomes more image based, people need the help of images to think about many topics.

Wikipedia did do somethings well. They created a very neutral online community, something that is quite rare in today's internet. People have been drawn together to achieve a common goal of creating a vast encyclopedia in a multitude of languages. Through this Wikipedia has brought together people from around the world to help achieve this goal. Throughout history, bringing such a diverse range of people from around the globe together is exceedingly rare and difficult. Wikipedia understands that there will be trolling, and has worked to mitigate and fix the destruction caused by trolls. Additionally, they do this in a rather non-hierarchical manner, with the community base all being contributors rather than moderators and regular users. As a new contributor, I feel that creating this article has given me a sense of accomplishment, and I feel a sense of responsibility to work to maintain my article. As a Wikipedia reader, I also feel the obligation to fix any clerical error or trolling on articles I read from now on.

To conclude, I think that Wikipedia has mitigated their commitment issues through fulfillment and intrinsic motivation provided by being a contributor rather than a user. They could improve their norms and regulations by streamlining and simplifying them for ease of use, especially for newcomers like me. However, Wikipedia's track record of success over the last 20 years proves they have a competent community model. While change can be integral for prolonged success, what they have right now works.