User:Ryanleys/Reflection

Wikipedia Reflection
I have to admit that I have edited Wikipedia pages before taking this class, however not in a way that would make the founders of Wikipedia (or my professor!) proud. As an early teen, friends and I would go on Wikipedia and edit pages with false information as an attempt to be funny, and every now and then tried to create Wikipedia pages for ourselves that were promptly taken down. Outside of that my Wikipedia experience has been purely as a consumer rather than a contributor—I don’t think I could have gotten through many of my classes without being able to use Wikipedia as a starting point, even if I wasn’t allowed to cite the article in my paper. After taking this class I’ve learned a lot about Wikipedia and Wikipedians, but I definitely think there is a lot of room for them to improve, particularly in their newcomer experience.

Taking a course with Joseph Reagle was a great way to learn a lot about the Wikipedia platform before jumping in, but it’s not an experience that most newcomers will have when creating a Wikipedia account. From my experience with creating a Wikipedia account, I did not find it to be a welcoming experience for new members. Had I not been coached through the process, I likely wouldn’t have known what a Sandbox was, how to add citations to an article, or the importance of collaboration across the platform. I was surprised by how difficult the process was because Wikipedia is such a large website with over 28 million members, I assumed that they would be more helpful in this aspect. Authors Kraut and Resnick talk in their book, "Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence Based Social Design,” about the importance of helping newcomer learn the ropes "by using formal, sequential, and collective socialization tactics," but I don’t think that Wikipedia does a successful job of making users feel comfortable enough to start contributing.

However, after the joining process Wikipedia did align with many of the other claims made in Kraut and Resnick’s book about what makes online communities successful. While I imagine that the majority of people who know about Wikipedia wouldn’t call it a community when describing it, after posting a single article I was put in contact with nine different people I did not know from class, which is much more interaction that I would typically get on a community like Twitter or Instagram from people I don’t know personally. These interactions align with Kraut and Resnick’s claim that interaction helps users feel as if they are a greater part of the community, as I did get excited to see that other people were interested in the topic I was working on.

One thing that I was able to experience which made Wikipedia feel much more like a community was when I was invited to a WikiProject focused on creating more Food and Drink articles on Wikipedia. The group consists of around 100 members who each have short bios about the type of Food or Drink they like to write about, and often a little about who they are as a person. One user wrote that she likes to write on the brownie, cookie, and apple pie pages because she’s on a diet and finds it comforting, while others are interested in food related to their culture or just food they think is interesting or taste good. This space really felt like a community to me where you could grow substantial relationships with other editors and possibly collaborate on articles or ideas with them. While I joined Wikipedia for extrinsic motivations and don’t imagine I will stay an active member going forward, if I had joined by my own volition I believe this would have been a large factor in determining if I stayed using Wikipedia as a contributor or if I went back to being a consumer. I did find it interesting though that I was invited to this page by a user; I feel like it would be a good opportunity for Wikipedia to invite people to specific WikiProjects based off of articles they’ve worked on. I imagine it would be fairly easy to find articles that have been updated recently, and then invite contributing users based on the tags of the article or keywords.

While I may not have figured out what a sandbox was on my own, I felt that this was a huge part in what eventually made me comfortable contributing to Wikipedia. Having a space where I could work on my project, and get it formatted how I wanted it before flipping the switch and having it accessible by everyone was useful because I could keep trying and re-trying until I had an article I was proud of. What also helped me create my article was the fact that you can see the raw source text from any other Wikipedia article, so I could go to other pages about restaurants and bars and see how they formatted their pages. This is how I figured out how to add categories to the bottom of the page, and what information is important enough to go beneath the image on the right side of my article.

My main suggestion for Wikipedia going forward is to make learning Wikipedia more accessible to people who are interested and want to know how they can become contributors. While you are prompted to read a few tutorials and look at the help page when you sign up, I think a mandatory interactive quiz that teaches you about the 5 Pillars of Wikipedia and some logistics about how to make an article or contribute to someone else’s article would help keep people active who may otherwise leave due to the barrier of entry. Overall I did have a positive experience on Wikipedia after getting past the learning curve and am impressed that with such an open source platform they are able to keep the articles largely accurate. If I could, I would go back and tell a younger version of myself not to troll Wikipedia, but I like to think that maybe I got someone involved in Wikipedia because they were upset that I was editing articles and wanted to do something to fix the situation.