User:Sean831/Report

Currently critics of wikipedia are mainly concerned with the reliability of the content being published, and the solution to resolve this issue is mainly relying on actively engaging wikipedians to fact check and edit articles with misinformation. Reflecting on my experience contributing to Wikipedia, I was able to assemble some advice to strengthen the following aspects of online communities and cultivate an environment that encourages wikipedians to continue their work. Such aspects include users' motivation, recruiting appropriate newcomers, and building commitment. I chose these aspects because inorder to ensure the success of building an online community, initial engagement and sustainability of the community is vital.

To strengthen these aspects, I propose to restructure Wikipedia as an educational and professional website similar to what Linkedin did with social media. In operational terms, first I’d advise developing projects and programs in collaboration with Universities and start selecting college students as the focus of new user recruitment. The inspiration behind this is the course I'm enrolled in which had the Wikipedia engagement part of the class. The reason for this advice is that Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, and budget problems will arise when trying to implement traditional marketing and advertising strategies. Hence incorporating Wikipedia to the education system, no advertisement would be necessary. Secondly if college courses ask students to take part in Wikipedia, college students would be extrinsically motivated to join Wikipedia. This advice also extrinsically incentivizes college students with little to no work experience to join the community if their contribution is recognized as work experience they could put on their resume. Additionally since there is no direct monetary involvement it would prevent crowding out intrinsic motivation by extrinsic rewards. How is this possible? This brings me to my second advice of creating features on the user’s home page that allow users to receive feedback and a reliable point system in three roles; Moderator, Editor, and Author. This allows employers to review the user's experience as an author, editor or their management ability. Therefore reinforcing college students' motivation to participate in Wikipedia’s online community. To support this feature, which implies the goal of encouraging commitment and motivation, Wikipedia should also introduce my third piece of advice. When signing up for new users, have some sort of introduction and quiz to Wikipedia community rules along with a short survey that includes what's the reason for creating a new user, and current occupation. This draws from a concept of persuasive techniques of motivating participation; reaching out to specific people with appropriate tasks. For instance if a user discloses their current occupation as an editor at New York Times, individuals could reach out to them to have them review an article and create connections with professionals like Linkedin. Additionally the labor of learning the norms and filling out surveys would result in a higher barrier of entry and sunk cost which would ultimately again increase the users commitment to the community. Addition to the user's commitment it is also important to emphasize on the user experience, this is where my next piece of advice comes in. It is to improve or simplify the source editing view. I propose this based on my own experience as a new user to Wikipedia, the frustration I had when I was trying to write my article but it felt like I had to learn computer coding in order to do so. Additionally because of the formatting, I found it difficult to find where the paragraph starts or ends. The long references were written out and merged to the actual content. Thus making it difficult for users, especially new users, to transfer their work from the sandbox to the official page leading to feelings of discouragement and defeat. My next piece also relates to user experience, that is to create a more approachable and private medium of communication for users beside the talk page. This new feature will ameliorate new incomer’s anxiety to publish. From my experience I was interested in contributing to the talk page and interacting with other wikipedians but the idea that my comment would be there publicly and permanently discouraged me from doing so. Hence if there was a device that’d function similarly to a DM on instagram new users like me would be much more willing to immerse ourselves in the community and communicate with other users. This piece of advice was also derived from the bonds-based commitment theory, where creating a private communication medium would allow users to form intimate relationships with other users, resulting in it to be more difficult to quit engaging with Wikipedia. My last advice is to limit the articles a user can work on at a given time. This is because when I was assigning myself articles to build upom, my enthusiasm and interest wanted to pick seven articles. Consequently this brings up the free-rider problem, where users will sit back and allow other users to do more work. To prevent this, creating smaller groups by limiting articles a user can work on at a given time will encourage users to be more committed and willing to contribute.

In conclusion the major concepts of type of motivation, norms and regulations and newcomers are relevant and applicable. These are all elements in play of the online community between Wikipedia users. I would say that certain forms of commitment are generally more applicable. One could argue that identity based commitment would be more prominent than others such as bonds based or need based as the platform isn’t a social media and its rare for a situation it would be costly for users to stop engaging. This is only reasonable because Wikipedia is different from other online communities such as Yelp and Reddit. Yelp and Reddit primarily function as a forum for social engagement between users while Wikipedia mostly function as an encyclopedia and a platform for reading up on articles of interest, social interactions are commonly only limited to the articles material.