User:Savula98/Report

Wikipedia is a great source for people to come together and collaborate, and I’ve enjoyed having the opportunity to learn more about how this community works. Writing my own article has taught me a lot about this process, and it’s made me thankful for all of the Wikipedia writers that have dedicated time into writing articles I’ve searched for in the past. The stub article I chose to expand upon was the Seattle sushi roll. This article was an extremely low-class stub article with limited information on the topic. I learned a lot about Wikipedia through this process, and was able to apply many of the concepts we learned in class while creating this article.

Some improvements to the Wikipedia community and Wikimedia Foundation would be to link smaller stub articles to larger relevant articles, create a more hands-on education platform, and to create a suggested list of stub articles in order of relevance.

The problem of irrelevant stub articles was discussed in many different article’s talk pages. I saw this was an issue for the articles I edited during the peer review, as well as my own article’s talk page. Many of the Wikipedia users made the claim that the stub articles were irrelevant and don’t need to exist, and that this problem can be solved by moving or linking them to the larger more relevant articles. The issue of relevance can be solved by making a suggested list for newcomers to edit, based on the relevance level of the stub article itself. There seem to be a lot of stub articles labeled “irrelevant”, and suggesting more relevant articles to be edited will help reduce this issue.

Wikipedia education platform can also create more video tutorials, since the majority of the time I spent on WikiEdu was flipping through the different tutorial pages. These pages took a long time to search through, and I found myself skimming through the tutorials so I wasn't educated enough on the topic to make the correct edits. This adjustment will help newcomers enter the Wiki community more smoothly and to be more educated on the norms of the community. Educating the newcomers will help protect the community from harmful and damaging articles that newcomers might create, as well as save time on editing those articles in the talk page and not letting them be published live.

My experience in Wikipedia had a big learning curve for me. When I first started learning about all the rules behind Wikipedia, I was confused and overwhelmed. However, it helped to have WikiEdu pages to teach me about the different guidelines that go into writing a Wikipedia article. I’m a visual learner, so I experienced a lot of trial-and-error when writing my Wikipedia page. I began by writing about Seattle homelessness, which had a lot of scholarly sources to reference. I ended up having to change my topic because I was unaware that it was a well-developed C-class article, so I switched to writing about the Seattle sushi roll. This topic was a lot harder to find references and relevant information on the internet. I focused on looking at similar articles, like the California sushi roll, to reference my own article to make sure I was following the same guidelines. I learned that it’s vital in Wikipedia to have a neutral tone, and that was hard to achieve at times. I think it would’ve been more difficult for me to have a neutral tone if I continued to write about the Seattle homelessness issue, since that topic is considerably more political than the Seattle sushi roll. I also learned that referencing is vital when writing an article, and that there is a lot of work that goes into making sure an article is published.

In Wikipedia, a lot of the users in the talk pages are extremely familiar with the rules and norms of Wikipedia. This knowledge shows their immense dedication to Wikipedia, categorizing them as having an identity-based bond. Their bonds identify with Wikipedia since they are wanting to improve articles to better Wikipedia as a whole. These users also closely identify with the norms and ethics of Wikipedia, and take their job very seriously. The talk pages are filled with comments and recommendations on how to improve articles, and it's because of their identity-based bond that gives them the motivation to do so. My recommendations fall in line with the same problems other Wiki users are worried about, so I think that they’d agree that it’s smart to create more relevant articles for the public. Additionally, my suggestion on more elaborate and interactive training modules will help the Wiki community with any potential influx of newcomers. Properly educating newcomers will help protect the community and their norms they already have in place. Creating video tutorials will help newcomers better understand the rules while creating the articles in their sandbox, and they will create more polished articles since they’d be experienced in using the software Wikipedia teaches. My recommendations should be taken more seriously than just random advice from another new user because I’ve learned about the importance of these changes in class, and how online communities operate at their best and worst.

It was interesting and very helpful to apply the different concepts in class to this project. The motivation, commitment, norms and rules that go on in the Wikipedia community are unique to Wikipedia. This community is extremely knowledgeable about their rules and norms, especially with how they manage to deal with newcomers. The only issue that Wikipedia struggles with is its ability to create motivation and commitment for people to continue to edit stub articles. There isn’t much incentive to be volunteering to edit Wikipedia articles, besides having it be an assignment for a class. All Wikipedia editors are volunteers, and I’d imagine it’s difficult to recruit people to edit the long list of stub articles.

I think compared to other online internet communities, Wikipedia has created an extremely open and welcoming way of entering the community. There were many tutorials and a very detailed process that is put in place specifically for newcomers in the community. I’ve also heard of “Wikipedia edit-a-thons” and similar events on campus at the University of Washington, which is also something that makes Wikipedia unique. By creating a sense of community, these events would strengthen the bonds-based commitment in Wikipedia users. Knowing that there are people editing articles that millions of people read on the internet is comforting, as well as knowing how many rules and guidelines there are to creating these articles. Some articles can have a lot of influence because it’s read by millions of people all over the world.