User:SamDiamond88/reflection

Intro: Hiding in Plain Sight
When I joined Wikipedia, I discovered a community hidden in broad daylight. The free, online encyclopedia is an extremely recognizable and popular website, yet the community that keeps it running somehow flies under the radar of many visitors.

This semester, I contributed to my very first Wikipedia article as part of a class requirement. Though I’m normally inclined to be a lurker for the first month or two in a new online community, the class assignment forced me to begin participating immediately. Therefore, I developed a first impression through contributing and interacting instead of secretly observing. I also had the unique opportunity of simultaneously learning the ropes in one online community and studying the nature of online communities in class – an uncommonly meta-analytical approach to taking on the newcomer role. Here, I reflect on the pleasant surprise of a community that had stayed hidden from me for years.

Easy Recruits
My professor undoubtedly had a heavy influence in my joining this site, but I was a particularly easy Wiki-recruit for another reason: familiarity. According to the familiarity heuristic, people tend to think highly of people, things and ideas that they are more familiar with. The more you have read, heard or otherwise encountered a company’s brand, the more likely you are to trust and feel affinity for that brand. I had encountered and used Wikipedia hundreds of times before taking this class. Over the years, I grew to trust Wikipedia content because the website is often listed within the first four results of a Google search, my friends use it frequently to find information, and it comes up in conversation when anyone mentions internet research. Because I was so familiar with Wikipedia, I was not a hard sell; I was easily convinced of its reputability and the quality of the community.

I expect Wikipedia has the familiarity heuristic on its side when it comes to recruitment. Continuing to land on the first page of Google search results, and continuing to provide a wealth of up-to-date and navigable content contributes to Wikipedia’s reputation as a reliable and valuable website and creates many potentially easy recruits – like me, they simply need a push to join.

Recruitment: Quality Over Quantity
I suspect that many Wikipedians join the site after recommendation from a friend or acquaintance. Word-of-mouth recruiting is “substantially more powerful than impersonal advertising” because social influence is heightened by the “immediacy, strength, and number of influence sources” we encounter. We are influenced more heavily by people who are close to us and interact with us often. A strong tool for any community, word-of-mouth may be Wikipedia’s best bet for drawing in new members, as wider-reaching methods don’t quite fit.

Some communities take advantage of social influence by reaching out to their members’ online friends via social media. Although recruiting from existing social networks of current members can increase new membership in communities, this method is not universally useful. Wikipedia cannot put stock in reaching out to social networks because of anonymity. Since joining Wikipedia, I have encountered more users employing pseudonyms than those that use real names (or a variation on their real names), suggesting that Wikipedians value their anonymity and the ability to write and edit without being connected to their real-life personas. The method of recruiting from online social networks would be difficult to employ in a community where most people actively disconnect from their social network identity.

Widespread advertising techniques are also not ideal because the nature of Wikipedia values quality over quantity of members. The community is based on the common goal of recording information in a clear and neutral way. Where social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram will thrive based on the sheer number of members, Wikipedia will thrive with members that are competent writers, dedicated researchers, and committed editors. Recruiting thousands of new members does no good if those recruits are not competent and passionate about the community mission.

Further, widespread outreach could be detrimental to the Wikipedia community by hindering screening and selection, the processes by which a community decides which newcomers are a good fit and which are undesirable. Newcomers that do not have the skills or interest in the mission could cause harm by deleting relevant articles, creating unnecessary articles, incorrectly categorizing and tagging content, and editing out of accordance with Wikipedia guidelines – all of which would cause aggravation to existing passionate Wikipedians. Ultimately, word-of-mouth recruiting leads to better fitting newcomers, but this method casts a much smaller net than conventional advertising, and likely contributes to the community’s lack of visibility.

Navigating as a Noob
Once a new member is recruited, Wikipedia's features are well-designed to ease newbies into editing. The site’s student tutorial not only teaches a rookie how to use editing tools, but also plays a role in self-selection, the process by which a newcomer decides if he/she is a good fit for the community. Providing new members with an “accurate and complete picture of what the members’ experience will be once they join increases the fit of those who join.” The tutorial gave me a clear idea of the process and experience of contributing on Wikipedia. Moving forward, I was able to begin participating with a solid concept of how to behave and what to expect from other members.

After filtering through some stub articles, I set to work researching and expanding the article on Cat training, which had been last edited significantly in | August 2014. The article looks like this as of | April 3, 2015. Before making revisions with the big kids, I began writing in my personal sandbox.

The sandbox may be the most supportive feature on Wikipedia, providing comfort and freedom to newbies. Sandboxes speed up learning and reduce the harm to the community that newcomers can cause. In my sandbox I explored text formatting, linking, and using headers. I practiced citing various sources until I felt comfortable with the citation methods. The sandbox relieved the intimidation associated with contributing for the first time, and simultaneously decreased the potential harm I might cause by making formatting errors or inserting broken links that others would need to spend time fixing.

Another community strength lies in the multitude of templates, which not only help readers to navigate content, but help users like me learn how to organize information consistently. As my confidence grew, I took advantage of citation and linking templates, and borrowed templates from existing articles, like the “About” template. It was comforting to know that if I wanted to add any new aspect to an article, I could often find a template to show me the Wikipedian way of doing it. As a newcomer, this made it much easier to begin contributing, because it reduced the fear of error and the feeling of navigating an overwhelming trove of stylistic rules.

When I moved into the 'real' article space, I used well-developed articles like Animal Training and Dog Training as references for the layout and design of my work. These articles were just as comforting as the templates, acting as mentor articles that guided me through the organization of my own.

Conclusion: Raising Awareness
I see value in Wikipedia relying on word-of-mouth recruitment, with a caveat: more conventional advertising can increase the number of newcomers who join an online community, “especially among potential members with little prior knowledge.” I was one of those potential members with “little prior knowledge.” I had used Wikipedia hundreds of times to research for school assignments, to explore topics of my own interest, and to fact-check, all the while having very little knowledge of the community behind the articles.

I knew nothing of the Talk Page, the Revision History, and the Sandbox; these were foreign terms in my mental script of the Wikipedia landscape. Four short months ago, Wikipedia was just a large compilation of informational pages; now it is a living community filled with discussion and deliberation. The content is ever-evolving as articles are tagged and flagged, created and deleted, revised and reverted. Wikipedia is not a collection of knowledge; it is more a collecting of knowledge. This is a place where people write, share, and work together with the common mission of recording information; a place where you could be part of an edit-a-thon, or an edit-war. Various features like templates and sandboxes help to ease the transition from newcomer to contributor. On top of this, newbies are welcomed through a policy of assuming good faith among members.

I think Wikipedia’s largest barrier to recruitment right now is that although many people are familiar with the site’s breadth of information, they are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. Few realize the depths of the community living, discussing, and editing behind the curtain – some may not realize the community exists at all. Finding ways to increase visibility and awareness of the community will expand the reach and effectiveness of word-of-mouth recruiting without necessarily opening the floodgates for a barrage of undesirable members. People are already familiar with Wikipedia as a source of information; I would encourage Wikipedia to give potential members a glimpse of the vibrant community under the surface.