User:Reinako/Report

= Wikipedia Report = In the beginning, I was very hesitant about editing my own Wikipedia pages. There were a lot of aspects to it that were really intimidating, and just throwing yourself into a new community with tens of thousands of internet strangers could mean that there was a percentage of them that might not be as welcoming. That idea of encountering a portion of unwelcoming editors was the scariest thing to imagine. But through my personal experiences with Wikipedia and WikiEdu, I had a lot of fun learning about how to edit, and what makes potentially good edits to Wikipedia pages that I would’ve never bothered to learn before.

The WikiEdu tutorials were really good at doing what they were meant to do: help new users learn how to edit Wikipedia pages, and being able to get help from some really friendly people. Elysia was someone I contacted to get help on editing my page and she gave some really solid advice. I worked on the Wish page, which is an app that involves online shopping and she suggested looking at other pages that are similar to what Wish is, such as eBay or Amazon pages. She also told me to take a look at the banners on the top that talk about how it’s worded like an advertisement, and to work on changing that tone throughout my editing. I think WikiEdu is a really good place for anybody to start editing, and something that Wikipedia could integrate into their own website so that it’s not only for the classroom setting. I really loved reading the training modules and how good articles to edit are ones that are “start” or “stub” class articles because they have something to work with and you don’t have to figure out how to start them from scratch. These modules also taught me how to use the source editor vs the visual editor, and how to properly cite items within the document as well. I personally really loved WikiEdu and would have definitely taken a chance to learn it more if Wikipedia had offered something like this after signing up for an account or something.

Aside from learning how to edit, when I first signed up for my account, I was invited to join the Teahouse and I thought that was a really welcoming feeling. We talked about this during our idea with commitment, that sometimes people will commit because they want to give back to the community. With this idea of reciprocity, being invited to the community made me feel more welcomed and likely to improve on editing so that I could give back to this community that I took for granted previously! Learning in class about how Wikipedia peaked and started losing a lot of editors while gaining more readers made me feel like I wanted to be able to do something to help. I think that with learning how to edit, and having a welcoming group to help me help this community is something I really appreciate and extinguished my initial fear of being unwelcomed. I think having communities that first reach out to a new user, instead of having the user themselves find their way around is a lot more appreciated and less overwhelming. Becoming a part of a community gives me that intrinsic motivation to help Wikipedia as an editor and I’m really eager to do that knowing that I have resources to help me achieve that.

With my experiences overall in Wikipedia these past number of weeks, I think there’s a lot that Wikipedia could try to do to gain new editors. When I first signed up with my account, I wasn’t feeling welcomed at all as a user, and there was no encouragement of getting me to edit or anything like that. If Wikipedia wants to find more editors, I think there has to be some kind of outreach for it. When we looked at the plummeting numbers of editors on the graph up until last year, I had no clue that was the case for Wikipedia. I assumed that there was still a good ratio of readers to editors because I never had many issues with finding Wikipedia pages for things I wanted to look up. But now knowing that, I’m more surprised that they haven’t tried to reach out to new users to ask them to edit pages and having a better tutorial system for that. I only felt more welcomed through WikiEdu and getting good advice from Elysia as well as getting invitations by the Teahouse community, but that was only after I had submitted my edits. And as a result of no outreach, users can’t be motivated or have a reason to stick around to edit if they’re not given anything to work with. The Help:Editing page is really vague and even the Wikipedia's "Your First Article" is really overwhelming personally. I really enjoyed the set up of WikiEdu by having exercises in between and giving achievable goals to becoming a better editor. And I think small extrinsic motivations can also help, like the way that Reddit has “new user” badges and badges for other milestones, I think Wikipedia could support something like that for new editors as well. These kinds of things exist with Barnstars of course, which are a good motivator for people within communities, but having something similar of a smaller degree could still retain the exclusivity of barnstars while also giving new users a feeling of achievement and satisfaction. This kind of reward personally feels really satisfying as a new user because I could feel myself being more welcomed through other people inviting me on my talk page, and I think small rewards do nothing less than that for new editors wanting some acknowledgement that they’re doing well. But overall, learning how to edit Wikipedia and getting to edit an article of my own is really exciting and one of my favorite experiences that I’ve had in school. WikiEdu was a really amazingly helpful resource that I think Wikipedia should follow after and maybe incorporated into their website.