User:Nucomm23/Wiki Reflection

Other than social media platforms, I had not been part of many online communities before I had ventured in Wikipedia as part of this class. I can barely call myself a "wikipedian" but it has been satisfying to create my own article and become somewhat of a historian, documenting about Bernard "Bunny" Solomon with information from the Northeastern archives. Although I am excited that I can say I created a Wikipedia page, it is not an online community I want to invest much more time in because the negative aspects of high navigation cost and large collection size outweigh the positives of creating new content and allowing meaningful contributions.

Navigation Cost and Collection Size
Kraut and Resnick discuss the idea of navigation costs and collection size which I found to be challenging in my experience with Wikipedia. The navigation costs describe the costs of getting to a website and displaying the content and the collection size refers to the amount of new opportunities each time a user navigates to the site. In Wikipedia, the overall collection size is seemingly endless and the navigation costs are high due to the large number of links within an article. The collection size has “an ambiguous scope for an interaction space which reduces expected match value” making it hard for new Wikipedians to find something they are truly interested in that has not already been created or that they have access to. For us as students, we were required to take the “online student orientation” which Kraut and Resnick argue “providing potential new members with an accurate and complete picture of what the members’ experience will be once they join will increase the fit of those who join"  Unfortunately, despite the orientation and the accurate picture of what contributing to Wikipedia will be like, I was not fully prepared to being a part of Wikipedia after one orientation.  With the complex Wiki mark up and many guidelines, it is hard to equip members with all the tools to use Wikipedia.  Countless “cheat sheet” referrals, questions to our Wikipedia ambassador, and links on links are necessary to find the answers and the correct way to do things.

RTFM
In addition, I found a lot of RTFM, or the idea that users should “read the fine manual” and educate themselves on their own time in Wikipedia. For example, trying to create my subpage on my user page, I thought I carefully read through the Wikipedia directions. I did not succeed and my page was nominated for speedy deletion. In the nomination, there are links to a section of the criteria for speedy deletion, Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines, and the welcome page for additional information. Wikipedia has so many fine manuals to read, it is hard to keep them straight. While it is understandable that a community whose goal is share as much knowledge about possible would have such a large collection size, it is undesirable for my tastes. I found that I did not have the intrinsic motivation to learn about Wikipedia and go through the process of becoming fully proficient at wiki mark up. For me, it was not “fun, interesting or challenging” and therefore, I was only working for the extrinsic motivation of a grade. It has led to a normative commitment, or the feeling that I ought to continue contributing to Wikipedia instead of wanting to continue.

System-Suggested Goals
Despite these negatives, Wikipedia did provide me with an overall positive experience. By providing the ability for creating my own content and the challenge of writing a perfect article, Wikipedia gave me a “specific and highly challenging goal" Kraut and Resnick argue that by providing these goals, which for me were class-set and system-suggested, it increases member contribution.  The goal of a perfect article and following all the guidelines of neutral point of view, no original research, and verifiability allowed me to have a clear goal to work for and contribute.  Amanda Rust also provided a specific list of “tasks” that we could chose from, empowering us to chose topics that interested us and therefore increase contributions.  The ability to chose a topic was much better than being assigned a topic, but upon originally not finding a topic that I wanted, I found that Wikipedia’s list of “red links” to be again, overwhelming.  After some searching, I was able to find a topic that was in the archives and a red link. The experience was satisfying and I found out a lot about an important figure at Northeastern, but I doubt I will find another topic that will drive me to create another article from scratch.

Bot Interactions
I am also thankful for the interactions with other Wikipedians, although they were small in number. Most of my interactions were with bots. Upon joining, I received an invitation from HostBot for the Teahouse, which happens to be the only other thing on my talk page besides classmates’ requirements or my nomination for speedy deletion. They were also my most frequent editors with three bots making changes to my page including BG19bot,  Cyberbot, and  AnomieBOT. BG19bot completed WP:CHECKWIKI, which helps clean up syntax and other errors in the source code of the Wikipedia by finding problems. In the diff here, it is obvious that I needed more citations and the bot updated the simple parenthetical information about his death for me. Wikipedia definitely didn’t bite me as a newcomer, but I did not have many opportunities to “engage in personal conversations to increase bonds-based commitment.”  My interactions were few, not personal, and not generally motivating. The vast amount of users complicates finding interactions and Wikipedia is not a social platform, which as aforementioned is one of my common motivators for joining. None of my interactions or experiences locked me into Wikipedia.

Conclusion
Overall, I find Wikipedia’s vast collection size is hard and intimidating to navigate and makes it hard to have any meaningful interactions with other users. The work to make meaningful contributions to Wikipedia is time consuming, needs a lot of reading the fine manuals, and access to many sources. I have developed a normative commitment to Wikipedia, making me feel as if I ought to contributing, but I, along with some of my other classmates, will probably only make minor edits. The extensive effort, lack of motivation, and few social interactions make Wikipedia uninteresting to me as a community to join for the long haul, but I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to have written a bit of history in a free encyclopedia. I know my mom and best friend from home are impressed at least.