User:Rich9799/Report

Reflection Essay

 * Class: COM 482A
 * Due Date: Monday February 17

As a new contributor to the Wikipedia community, I had a very difficult time trying to follow all the steps that Wikipedia posted on its website. I wasn’t quite sure how to edit or post images in my article. I believe that Wikipedia’s explanation can be very challenging to follow especially people with barely any knowledge of contributing to online communities. There are a lot of regulations and rules to follow, which potentially could discourage some users that would like to participate in this community. To solve/help this issue, I think the Wikipedia page should include official tutorial videos to visualize all these instructions and steps so that new users can easily watch the videos and practice for themselves. I had a very hard time following written steps because I was not able to visualize them and therefore it took me a while to complete one step.

What I contributed to Wikipedia was that I added more content to the existing article about Scotch & Soda. Scotch & Soda is a clothing brand from Amsterdam, Netherland. Recently, I got a part-time job from the University Village store and I was able to access their employee training files. These online files include all of their history and significant events that are very difficult to find online. When I checked the existing Wikipedia article about Scotch & Soda, there was only a little information about this topic. Since I’m passionate about the fashion industry, I decided to add more information to the article and luckily I was able to find a good amount of information from the company itself. I added more content to the “history” and “branding” part of the article because these were the main topics that I was able to acquire information from the Scotch & Soda’s employee training website.

I was very excited to contribute to this Wikipedia article because of the intrinsic reward from doing so. I’ve been a huge fan of the brand Scotch & Soda ever since I joined the university and it felt very pleasant for me to contribute to the Wikipedia community with a brand that I’m passionate about. I think that writing something that you’re passionate about is very important in terms of contributing to the Wikipedia community because there are no extrinsic rewards to the contributors. Therefore, you may find it very boring and pointless if you decide to write something that you don’t personally desire. As a new contributor, I truly believe that the quality of your content will get better as you care more about the topic that you’re posting.

Moderating other users’ contributions is very crucial for the Wikipedia community. It is because it keeps the content of the articles to meet the community’s standard as well as looking out for plagiarisms, biases, and property rights. However, there are no extrinsic rewards for users when they participate in the community. This may include things like ranking system, power over other users, and monetary benefit to active users. Therefore Wikipedia community is very unique in a sense of being very popular and having a lot of active contributors even though there are no significant extrinsic rewards for them. If I could add one thing to this community, it would be the 24/7 live-chat system with experienced users. Since there are a large number of experienced users, I think it would be very helpful to have access to communicate with these users in real-time to ask any questions that the new users/contributors may have.