User:SpiritedSeagull/Report

Reflection
Wikipedia is the most important encyclopedia to provide information on the web of the world. Millions of users browse and contribute their knowledge to the network. I found the uniqueness of Wikipedia is its neutral point of view and free content. The policy of a neutral point of view prevents controversy, bias, and benefit-seeking behavior. It is open to editors, rules, and design of the page structure under the amicable and respectful ambiance. Everyone is welcomed to participate in the construction of Wikipedia. With the mission of transmitting and collecting educational content, I deeply feel the goodwill and vision emanating from this community, and be proud of getting involved in this great undertaking.

I have improved a stub article. The list of stub articles that are categorized into various fields clearly provides what I will be interesting to edit, so I found the article I am intended to edit quickly. As a newcomer to Wikipedia editor, WikiEdu provides me a useful platform to get familiar with Wikipedia, and teach me how to be a good editor in Wikipedia. I spent a lot of time to learn Wikipedia policy to ensure my writing has neutral point, verifiability, and notability. I learned that news, textbooks, and literature reviews can be used as reliable reference for the article instead of blogs posts and distorted press material. Another big thing I learned is copyright violation. Different from plagiarism, closely paraphrasing by using similar structure is not allowed in Wikipedia. In order to be objective and neutrality under Wikipedia’s policy, I deleted my section of evaluation of the subject from other peers’ perspective. Due to the limited sources in the U.S. database, most of the reference I founded are news reported from a foreign country where the figure of my article made contributions, so I could make a lot of statements for the article. I got the benefits from my native language that is just the same language, but it may be challenging for readers who cannot access this as their foreign language. Overall, it is a precious experience for me to be a member of Wikipedian and cooperate to create this free and helpful encyclopedia.

Through my experience, I found several main challenges for Wikipedia. Firstly, the accuracy and authority of the contents of the article need to be improved. Because everyone including anonymity and regular users are able to edit or delete works on the page, it may not be ensured the quality of contents are highly professional. In addition, managers in Wikipedia also hardly prevent malicious editors from deleting valuable work from others and putting slanders or nonsense words in millions of articles even the technology cannot detect the subtle destruction using academic genre. Therefore, I would recommend to recruit more professionals from different fields to join editing Wikipedia, and categorize their professional articles in specific columns for people to read. Then readers will feel more trustful about using Wikipedia for looking up sources.

Secondly, it is significant to think about maintain a large population of volunteers to edit, since Wikipedia has no incentive award system in neither money nor reputation. Every user contributes themselves to Wikipedia depends on their insist faith in public benefits. However, contributors’ name was hidden by the greatness of this project. It contradicts with the affective commitment that provides an emotional connection to the group according to the class. Although the population of editors is huge, the anonymous Wikipedia community cannot extend social networking, so Wikipedia cannot successfully transforming into a highly cohesive social network like Facebook and Quora. They have higher social features, because every precious response will achieve “like”s from others to enhance respondents’ reputation, which has higher motivation effects. Nowadays people pay more attention to the self-centered information flow, and get continuous and instantaneous motivation from “like”s and interaction. My recommendation would like to be justified based on the concept from the course material. Intrinsic interests by “creating immersive social environments with clear, sincere, performance feedback” drive participation. The interaction between users not only contributes to the continuous and in-depth discussion of issues, but also creates a community atmosphere that allows more like-minded people to stay. Extrinsic rewards such as money or privileges, prizes and status also approach to get contributors.

Therefore, I would suggest Wikipedia could encourage users to establish their persistent identities with their real profile pages, using the network effect to expand the participant base. What’ more, it could add “like”, and “comment” button for users to be highly involved in the community, which may close the user’s relationship and determine the importance of the articles. Then editors who got more “like”s will win more prestige and privilege, such as getting followers, medals, or specialized titles. With the reputation and benefits, those highly qualified editors are motivated to make more effort on Wikipedia, which also helps to promote the overall quality of the contributions. My another suggestion is to develop Wikipedia editing in a mobile application with simple tools and editing methods. People are using mobile-phone more than lap-top most time. I think it would be more convenient and involved for users to contribute to Wikipedia if they can get access and contribute to the community everywhere. My recommendations be taken more seriously than just random advice from one new user, because I actively participated in this community and learned all the basic principles in Wikipedia through the training. I finished editing a stub article and reviewed two peer articles as well as interacting with the author on their talk page. Based on my experience, I think my recommendation can give a new insight for establishing an expanding and effective Wikipedia community.