User:Oliviaanne2001/Report

My experience using Wikipedia felt as if I was responsible for completing an easy task, like editing a friends’ article, and making it ten times harder by having to do it through Wikipedia. Especially in the first few weeks using the site, it took me a long time to understand all the extra steps that Wikipedia required, what the norms were for writing and editing, and even little things like not realizing I had to publish my first draft in my sandbox after I was done in order for anyone to be able to see and review it. I will admit, towards the end of the assignment and after finally making my article “live”, it is a pretty cool feeling, for whatever reason, to know that my writing is now public for people to visit, learn from, and help expand it further. Additionally, I realized after doing so much work on the platform that, while it seemed complicated at first, it had a ton of tools that made things like adding and organizing references or linking other wikipedia articles so much easier than they would have been trying to do it manually. Regardless of how I felt afterwards, my only motivation to start and stick with editing this article was the extrinsic motivation of knowing that this was for a pretty big portion of a grade for my class. I have a pretty good feeling that the average person feels the same, which is why the contribution on Wikipedia is so much lower than the amount of readers it has.

I believe the biggest issue for Wikipedia as a whole is the problem of motivating users to participate actively on their platform by adding information to articles and not just simply reading until they find what they need and leaving the site until they have something new they need to know. Currently, motivation to contribute to Wikipedia is, for most people, solely intrinsic. Someone may be intrinsically motivated because they have the best time in the world researching in their spare time and helping to educate others, and that’s great for those people, however, they are most likely the only ones contributing to Wikipedia. Most people simply do not care enough nor do they think it’s exciting to constantly be writing and editing articles. While Wikipedia does have a barnstar, badge, and self-awarded service award system, this only appeals to people already dedicated enough to be making significant contributions pretty regularly to receive these rewards. Similarly, while the service award seems like the solution, part of the excitement of getting an award is having it given to you, meanwhile, these are self-awarded. There is a lack of extrinsic motivators for newcomers to get them to want to not only help, but stay. This could be solved by adding an additional karma-like system that is displayed next to a user’s name in an edit history log. This would also encourage new users to initially contribute much more because they’re going to want to build their karma. In examples we looked at in class, karma often led to someone being more likely to become a moderator. Since just about everyone already acts as a moderator on Wikipedia, this karma system would just serve to show what users have been making lots of meaningful contributions that are of quality, which could be determined by how often someone else needs to go back in and edit their work. Karma would be revoked for contributions that are spam or when a user does something functionally problematic similar to something like leaving something un-cited. Work done that needs some improvement by other users wouldn’t be penalized but rather remain neutral in order to avoid discouraging users from contributing, because any contribution with good intention is meaningful.

My advice should be taken seriously because I had a full experience from start to finish of choosing an article, researching, editing, peer reviewing and publishing that was not just self explored, but guided by others who already had experience with Wikipedia, this means that if I was noticing problems or areas that could be improved even with guidance, newcomers on their own would most definitely be experiencing the same thing. Having an understanding of motivation and commitment types is also imperative to giving advice that can actually produce results; rather than trying to make changes based on another newcomer’s comments or complaints

Concepts that helped me understand why users do or do not contribute to Wikipedia most were those surrounding commitment types. In order to motivate users, which I believe is Wikipedia’s current biggest priority, it's also helpful to understand why editors then become committed to being an editor. Current users could experience a normative commitment type, and because of that, it is then important to understand what makes users feel an obligation to Wikipedia and it’s goals to help get them not only motivated but committed to being an active participant on the site. I didn’t feel that the concept of socialization for newcomers was applied much to Wikipedia because the initial work is mostly done solo, of course on the Wikipedia class page we interacted through peer reviews; but it was hard to see the effect of what newcomer socialization was actually like until we went live; and even then there wasn’t much of a social aspect other than other Wikipedians editing your work and leaving brief comments about the work, rather than socializing with the user for a connection. This is also a unique part of Wikipedia because oftentimes most contact comes from users simply editing another work, rather than looking to build a connection.