User:Rickijonna/reflections

Ricki Moses Interpersonal Media Wikipedia Reflection Essay

Over the past several weeks we have been participating in the online community Wikipedia in order to learn more about how it functions. Our assignment to create an article and interact with other members of the community was challenging and interesting because my experience with this site had previously only been as a visitor using it for research. The new role as a content creator shifted my perspective on Wikipedia entirely. Before, I viewed the online encyclopedia as a place for content that is nearly always trustworthy. I knew that the articles were created by everyday users but I thought that the only type of person who would write encyclopedic articles were knowledgeable people. Now that I have created an article myself I feel strangely responsible for the content and its validity. I wonder however, if others feel the same responsibility and if not, how often content is verified. There are countless pages on Wikipedia and a varying amount of editors. It seems unclear if the resources in place to check accuracy measure up to the amount of information they would have to check. That worry, however, affects the researchers visiting Wikipedia and not necessarily the community aspect of the site. Our main focus as a class was the website as an online community. As a new contributor to this online community Wikipedia was daunting. The big problem we talked about in lecture was how to increase the amount of contributors. The first thing that caught my eye was there did not seem to be very clear advertising to join. For a group who are eager to welcome new members Wikipedia did not seem to be putting the message out there. As visitors people are turned away to the idea of contributing to a vast encyclopedia with lots of rules and regulations, other members who are quick to correct you, and some need for background knowledge in coding. There seems to be a welcoming atmosphere once one signs up but getting people to through the door seems like a place for growth. That being said once I signed up there was a lot of resources to start learning how to participate. There is the welcome tutorial and the Wikipedia Adventure game that help to transition people into active participants. The regulations are still so widespread that it seems unreasonable for any one member to be expected to obey them all. In lecture we discussed how they chose to create regulations and guidelines in order to give the users the ability to create what kind of community they wanted to be a part of and that has yielded great success. Nevertheless there should be some sort of limit on the amounts of guidelines. For me they seemed insurmountable and a large reason I don’t expect to continue participating. Something to work on for Wikipedia is finding ways to keep users engaged once they know what they are doing. On some pages there are messages that say ‘help us improve this article’ which I think do a very good job of inviting people to do helpful and often smaller tasks. If there was a way to make these smaller objectives more accessible to the newer users it would be a great way for them to tip toe into contributing. This directly plays into the ‘ask and ye shall receive’ idea that we talked about in lecture. This could be a way to make the users feel like what they were doing was important and create normative commitment. I felt like there was already so many articles on Wikipedia that I could not be much of a help to the site and making that more clear could have encouraged me to stay around. Building commitment from there would be more straightforward. I was hoping to find bonds based commitment to keep me as a user. Making a network of like-minded people would be a powerful way to stay connected to the community and keep creating content. There are some great examples we learned about in class of groups of people who are connected and committed to the community like the Millitists or the Copy Editors Guild. However, I felt that those groups seemed few and far between and not attractive to me as a new member or most of the population of members. Maybe if there was a way for Wikipedia to know what I had been interested in working on and finding others with similar interests and using that data to spark more relationships that could be a way to increase bonds based commitments. The real reason that I am a user on Wikipedia however is for the this class assignment and although I have a new appreciation for the contributors and what it takes to create an article I don’t expect to continue contributing myself. Perhaps that is because my personality was not the type to be drawn in by the community, which is to no fault of Wikipedia of course. However if my potential had been better directed by the community then maybe it would have been enough.