User:Randallcj3/report

A consistent theme through my initial knowledge about online communities is that Wikipedia is one of the internet’s most successful communities. Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world with billions of page views each month, but just 137,383 users have edited Wikipedia in the last 30 days. One would think that over 100,000 users interacting with your community in a month is great, and it is, but Wikipedia currently has over 38 million registered accounts, meaning that far less than 1% of Wikipedia’s users are actively contributing to the community. As a new user and someone on the list of Wikipedians to contribute in the last 30 days, as well as someone who is learning about online communities, I have some insight that might be helpful to Wikipedia so that more users might contribute in the next 30 days.

As a newcomer to Wikipedia, I think I had a much different experience than a typical user would. By starting to use Wikipedia within the framework of the Wiki Education Foundation platform, I got extensive training on how to use, edit, and act on Wikipedia. Despite this training however, I found that Wikipedia was much more difficult to navigate than I had originally thought. It took me a few weeks of using the platform to feel comfortable navigating it and that is with training modules and experienced Wikipedians guiding me. This training is not something that the majority of people who join Wikipedia get, but I feel would be valuable for creating users that are more likely to make useful contributions. If I had just shown up to Wikipedia without those resources, it is very likely that I would've gotten discouraged purely by my inability to find my way around. We know that the connection that a newcomer has to an online community is delicate so that discouragement and frustration that I felt in my first few weeks of learning Wikipedia would've been enough for the typical newcomer to sever that frail connection they had to the community. Wikipedia's "don't bite the newcomer" policy is great as a way of encouraging positive initial interactions for new users, but Wikipedia could look at socializing more newcomers as a way of encouraging ongoing participation in the community.

Encouraging new users to engage in institutionalized socialization rather than a more individualized socialization would be mutually beneficial for both new users and Wikipedia. New users would feel more comfortable in the community and Wikipedia would be able to minimize damage from newcomers. The WikiEdu training used all of the forms of institutionalized socialization in one form or another, but Wikipedia should especially adopt the sequential socialization techniques in order to help new users navigate the platform and guide users through the process of editing articles in Wikipedia. They already have tutorials and the Wiki Education Foundation, but making these resources more easily accessible would be helpful for fostering productivity and reducing potentially harmful behavior from well-meaning newcomers. As one of the largest online communities, one that is dependent on production from users, Wikipedia as a large organization would be the perfect candidate for making the switch in forms of socialization. By attempting to socialize its newcomers in an organized manner, Wikipedia would likely be getting more value out of their new users than they are by not providing them proper training.

In editing an article on Wikipedia, I found that doing it in a sequential manner by drafting in my sandbox and a peer review before making my edits live was helpful. The guidelines for editing Wikipedia and a writing assignment for a college class are similar and to go through a similar, familiar process in joining the Wikipedia community was equally useful. Wikipedia encourages its users to "be bold", something that for the first few weeks on Wikipedia I found to be difficult. After going through the training and earning a greater sense of self-efficacy in the Wikipedia space, I made a few minor edits to pages as a steppingstone to the larger edits I was drafting in my sandbox.

This is another area that I believe Wikipedia could help newcomers; by suggesting tasks for them to do when they arrive, even if they are small. This could be a part of an initiation or welcome tutorial. I envision it being similar to many games where when you first start playing, the game takes you through a series of steps before you are able to go out and play on your own. If when you create your Wikipedia account, a tutorial came up where you go into an article that needs some sort of edit and the tutorial walked you through how you to edit that article, I think many newcomers would feel more comfortable. At the end of the tutorial, there could also be a few questions that could lead you a list of articles on a topic you might be interested in improving, which would give new users a greater sense of direction when joining and could lead to more participation from newcomers.

When I made my edits live on Wikipedia, I had this great sense of accomplishment. I've checked back into the article and have seen that my edit sparked edits from other users after the article had not been edited in almost six months. Seeing others interact with what I had done also gave me a sense of fulfillment and another user removed the stub tag from the article after the edits I made. I mention this feeling, because I think that if more newcomers had a similar feeling after making their first edit on Wikipedia, there would be a higher percentage of Wikipedia's users that are actively contributing to the site in the next 30 days.