User:Samtaliuw/Report

I had a good experience with the Wikipedia projects. I learned a lot about the platform and how its community is structured. I was surprised to learn about the different levels of collaboration going on. My teachers in high school used to tell me Wikipedia is bad because anyone can contribute to it, but now I realize that's actually what makes it good. In a way its a self correcting textbook. I think Wikipedia should remember to never stray from that. In my mind, it is the core of what makes Wikipedia, Wikipedia.

If I were to make any suggestions to Wikipedia regarding what they should do to better their platform, I would tell them they could still continue to promote collaboration. The talk page is great, and does a fine job, but at some point becomes tedious to read. I think the platform could benefit from some sort of direct messaging system. In my experience, users don't like to scroll through lines and lines of text to find one particular quote someone said 4 years ago. Adding a direct message system will allow users to have a database of everything they've talked about with certain people. This wouldn't take place of the Talk page, of course. The Talk page is still critical to informing a larger group about any up coming changes or potential changes to the article. The direct message system would be used to hash out disagreements or other conversations that could benefit from privacy.

We talked a lot in class about how users don't like tedious tasks and these will often discourage them from using the platform. It seems to me Wikipedia is sort of dying. For example, I didn't realize the levels that went into each article. In fact, I was taught by teachers not to use Wikipedia. If the platform wants to continue to grow their platform they need to make it easier to use for the first time poster. The fact that we spent half of a course learning about the platform is a testament to its barriers of entry. In my opinion, that is the biggest issue they face.