User:Studentuw123/report

Throughout the past two months, I have become a member of the Wikipedia community from making small edits to articles to adding brand-new information to articles. It was an educational experience however, there were some notable things that need improvement and ideas within other online communities that Wikipedia could implement to have a more positive user experience. In this essay, I describe my personal experience using Wikipedia, offer advice to the Wikimedia Foundation, and take my course material learnings in my Online Communities class to relate to Wikipedia.

My experience with Wikipedia was limited before taking this online communities course. Before, I would use Wikipedia occasionally for its encyclopedia. Previous educators have informed me that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, anyone can post on it. It was important not to use Wikipedia as an academic source. Because of my preconceived notions toward Wikipedia, I have not used it for research purposes. I’ve primarily used Wikipedia to look up one specific piece of information but I didn’t usually end up clicking on the page.

Getting started with Wikipedia was a little confusing. The process to create an account was not very positive. But I ran into a problem the second time I tried to log into my account. I saved my password to my keychain and when I tried to log on the information was gone. It took me about an hour to retrieve it because I didn’t have a certain setting turned on. This setting locked my Wikipedia account. I had to search for a specific email sent from Wikipedia just to log in and manually change some settings just to log into my account.

The training modules were mostly text. I personally am a visual learner. I like watching tutorials on how to do specific things. If there would have been more videos on how to navigate Wikipedia I would have had an easier time. Yet, I do think that everyone learns differently, for me there was a learning curve. Through doing the training modules, I wonder if these are just through WikiEd or if they are general for everyone. I am wondering if everyone who follows the training modules uses the same modules that we used for our class.

One of my biggest challenges was saving my work after I changed or edited every little detail. I think it’s unnecessary using this feature if you’re reworking an entire article in your sandbox. I think when making my edit summary I didn’t include every little detail of what I did because it felt unnecessary. Another challenge was trying to match the flow of the already existing work that was made in the article. I am comfortable with essay writing, so I felt as though my added work was sounding more like an essay than an encyclopedia. If there were more guidelines on how to make the tone of the article fit together it would have been easier to create.

Wikipedia is a good website for putting information out there. However, I think there is room for improvement within their site. I think they should make the training modules required, improve their citations, and overall enhance the site with technological improvements.

The first notable thing I think Wikipedia should implement is having training modules be required to edit and create on Wikipedia. In the Online Communities course, we were required to do training modules before we started creating any final decisions. With a community like Wikipedia, it’s very possible that not everyone uses these community resources because they are not required. Many people just skip over it because they don’t have respect for Wikipedia and don’t view it as a community. Having clear standards for editing on Wikipedia, will make it a more reliable place of information.

It’s unclear which type of citation is correct to use for Wikipedia. You’re able to copy and paste your own citations while also creating citations through an automatically generated system. However, using this system proved to be difficult so through my own experience I used an online citation generator instead and copy/pasted my citations into the system. In the future, Wikipedia should improve its citation generator and also have an automated system that checks these citations.

For most of these proposed changes, technological improvements to the Wikipedia site is a must. Adding in features similar to Grammarly with an automatic spelling, grammar, and plagiarism check would increase trustworthiness. Currently, the only way to ensure that what gets posted on the site is by other people in the community checking and editing it. I’d imagine that other peoples’ opinions get clouded by judgement. Having an updated artificial intelligence system for detecting error in an article would take weight off of Wikipedia contributors for editing updated articles.

In our Online Communities course, we’ve been studying how to create a successful online community as well as why some communities fail. Wikipedia is a successful online community in many ways relating to overall engagement. People make contributions daily to add more information to this online encyclopedia. They keep people motivated to participate. But this motivation can be contextualized with a theoretical model. There are two key types of motivation extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic motivation is a motivation that relies on something from outside the person. Intrinsic motivation is motivation coming from something inside the person. Examples of extrinsic motivation in the Wikipedia community would be people who want to have more writing experience for their resume. Intrinsic motivation in the Wikipedia community would be people who enjoy writing or editing. It can be a fun pastime for people wanting to discover a new topic or expand their knowledge on a topic.

Wikipedia is a unique platform for people to be apart of. First off, they are very open, and anyone can make contributions globally. Wikipedia is available in hundreds of languages and accessible across the world, so there isn’t just one perspective to this encyclopedia. However, this could cause some issues of spammers and trolls abusing this. Wikipedia is a great free platform available for anyone with an internet connection to use. However, as technology improves, Wikipedia will eventually need to make changes to keep up with the times by implementing artificial intelligence to the website. Becoming apart of the Wikipedia community and taking this Online Communities course has giving me more perspective as to how an online community works and where issues may arise.