User:Rockinslick/Report

Overall, my experience working on Wikipedia for the past few weeks has been very positive. I was able to contribute towards an article that focuses on a topic that I am very passionate about. The article that I contributed to was about Toro y Moi’s What For? album. While contributing to Wikipedia, I was able to expand on my current skills in giving/receiving feedback. When giving feedback to my classmates, I was able to identify how beneficial certain sources would be to the page it was being used on. When it comes to building off of my criticisms, I was able to increase my skills in writing neutral content. When I posted my original draft on my sandbox, my analysis of the album was fairly minimal and portions of it were biased towards a review of the album. After receiving my first batch of critiques, I was able to expand on my contributions to the article by applying album chart rankings and an analysis of the album that does not contain a bias. I would take direct quotes from various articles and Toro y Moi, in order to help viewers understand Chaz’s thought process when developing the album.

During my process of working on Wikipedia, I found the “view history” tab to be a very unique feature on the platform. This is because this tab provides editors and viewers a chance to see how article pages have evolved over time. This allows for members of the Wikipedia community to view the progress that has been made, and it provides an opportunity for contributing members to form a community. Currently, I do believe that it is hard to form a community on the Wikipedia platform. There isn’t a forum where members can work together in trying to provide viewers with the best content/information on the internet. In order to try and strengthen the Wikipedia community, I believe that the introduction of a badge system would be very beneficial to the platform. Currently, I believe that there is not a lot of motivation for users to take part in editing a Wikipedia article. Adding a badge system for users that provides privileges throughout Wikipedia, would encourage old and new users to contribute throughout the website. Providing different kinds of badges would help members of the community create an end goal for what they would like to achieve on the platform. Having badges near user IDs will also help people identify them easier. Currently, users can only see the username of those who have made edits to a page. Seeing someone’s rank based on a badge icon would help all users determine whether or not the person adding edits is "experienced". Enlightening new users about their edits, would help foster a stronger community, while rewarding key members with social recognition and would increase Wikipedia’s user morale.

At its current state, Wikipedia feels like it has a very lifeless user interface. New members are provided with a cluttered screen of text and there is a minimal tutorial on how to use the site. For newcomers, I believe that the site struggles with supporting them when it comes to retention and socialization. In terms of socialization, it is important to provide new users with a tutorial on how to properly cite information on Wikipedia. If newcomers are adding information to a page without any sources, they are likely going to have their work removed. This then ties in with retention. Newcomers might spend a lot of time on their first contributions so that they can start with a lasting impact on the site and removal of their work prevents any chance for the platform to develop a community built around identity-based commitment. This results in them feeling removed from Wikipedia’s overall belonging. If newcomers are not properly taught how to use the site, they will leave the community due to pre-existing fragile connections. In order to avoid this, I believe that Wikipedia should adopt a teaching system similar to the WikiEdu platform we used in this class. Prior to this class, I never made any edits to Wikipedia because I found their user interface to be very confusing (I imagine that many new users have this experience). Providing users with a module-based tutorial will help them learn how to properly use the platform.

In the end, I found my experience on Wikipedia to be an informative one. I enjoyed updating a page that I am passionate about. Outside of this class, I do not think that I will be returning to the platform to edit other articles. I believe that the platform itself is essential to the internet due to it holding so much information. It is a source for casual web-explorers to find information based on what they’re looking for. But, I believe that the platform’s user coordination is significantly outdated. Since I have spent the last month consistently working on this platform, I am still struggling with fully understanding how to coordinate all of the various functions that Wikipedia provides. I find it very hard to try and communicate with others due to there not being a forum/chat option. The talk pages are an attempt at this but fall short due to threads being hard to navigate and non-intuitive. Since the Wikipedia platform solely relies on user contributions, it is important that they are able to recruit new users to keep the site active. Wikipedia inherently relies on their community to fact-check information and create informative posts for the broader internet. If there is a decrease in newcomers, the overall quality of the site would diminish.