User:Susususushi/reflection

Would I choose to continue contributing to Wikipedia? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself repeatedly during the term. Frankly, before I took this course, I knew very little about the norms of online platforms, how to recruit new users and geek culture. I didn’t particularly appreciate expressing my opinion publicly on the Internet or gaining membership within an online community. Even knowing that Wikipedia’s mission was to welcome everyone as contributors and editors a long time ago, I simply enjoyed the convenience of gaining information from other people’s contributions and never considered becoming a student editor. As many instructors emphasized that Wikipedia could not be used as reliable academic material, I was very skeptical about this community when I entered. However, my perception of this online community was completely turned upside down by my learning this semester. I’ve experienced Wikipedia’s enthusiasm for new recruits, peer support, strict NPOV requirements, and the arduous initiation process. All these experience encouraged me to continue contributing to Chinese Wikipedia community in the future.

Institutionalized socialization tactics
Although my contributions to Wikipedia this semester have not been particularly rich in amount, I still feel really included in this online community. The main reason why I persist in performing actively in this community is not simply because this is my capstone class, and I have to finish the task. Instead, my motivation is driven mainly by the more institutionalized guidance I received and the friendly community atmosphere that generously helps each other.

Interaction with other students
Link: Special:Permalink/1149706336

It was very fortunate that all of us were able to share similar tasks when we first entered the Wikipedia community. This is uncommon in most online communities because "socialization processes in most online communities are informal and individualistic". During the class discussion, many students also expressed that they had no chance to get in touch with more experienced editors in the community, and many people did not know about the existence of "mentor". In other words, the mature editors in the Wikipedia community have a limited understanding of our new members, and newcomers were lack the opportunity to reach out to others at the initiation stage.

Our collective initiation experience helped create a better foundation for our subsequent independent projects. Just as Kraut and Resnick's design claim 19 stated, "When newcomers have friendly interactions with existing community members soon after joining a community, they are more likely to stay longer and contribute more". And it let me had a positive attitude towards exploring this community on my own. At the beginning of the semester, everyone was at a stage where they were afraid to engage with editors in the community. Dr. Reagle asked us to leave messages on two students’ talk page who we had not spoken to. It was a low-risk project, a simulation for our interaction with other editors within Wikipedia community. By observing the content of classmates' comments and thinking about how to respond them, we experienced the exploration of talk page and the determination of community communication mode collectively.

I remembered Dr. Reagle sharing in class that other experienced editors in the community recognized and praised the work of our class. In my opinion, the main reason why we were able to avoid possible harm student editors, and newcomers might have done to the community  was that we used institutionalized social tactics within the online community. As Kraut et al. mentioned in the article, "new members learn the ropes primarily via trial and error". The collective initiation experience of our class can also be considered as a way of attending the collective trial, and the interaction with other users were valuable. In our initial QIC presentation, many students did not know how to insert links properly or add sources. When we found that other students could complete the task correctly, we started to learn their behavior and correct our mistakes. Wikipedia should consider giving prospective newcomers a collective initiation experience instead of each having its own editing/ community rule tutorial. While newcomers can go to the Tea House and ask questions, having a peer learning experience can positively help newcomers integrate into an online community like Wikipedia, where there are obvious barriers to entry.

Get Help from Particular Community Member
Link: Special:Diff/1146978799/1147045338

There are three design claims can be related to my wonderful experience contacting with my mentor. I want to discuss my personal experience and how my contribution to Wikipedia community related to them separately.

Design Claim 19
"Encouraging newcomers to reveal themselves publicly in profiles or introduction threads gives existing group members a basis for conversation and reciprocation with them and increases interaction between old-timers and newcomers".

I am the only student in this class who has been assigned a mentor. I have been thinking about why I was given this opportunity. I specifically checked other students' contributions, which were more connected to the Wikipedia community than mine. After listening to Dov's explanation in last Friday's class, I suddenly thought of this design claim and totally agreed with Dov's assumption. Maybe spending 4 hours figuring out how to add some description on my profile page, how to upload photos, and how to add some categories to state personal identification was not a waste of time but an effective technique all newcomers should consider using to increase their exposure to old-timers.

Design Claim 20
''"Assigning the responsibilities of having friendly interactions with newcomers to particular community members increases the frequency of these interactions". ''

I was assigned to a very friendly, experienced, and helpful editor. She is my community mentor for future contributions. From her talk page and the long list of people's names she has helped on her user homepage, it can be seen that she is an active old-timer on Wikipedia. She proactively greeted me and communicated the positive message, "I am willing to help you". Her warm action encouraged me to reach out for help. And when I looked at her talk page, I found that she had incredible patience. Some newcomers who left comments on my mentor's talk page can quickly find answers to the questions they ask. And these questions could even be regarded as elementary questions after finishing the tutorials. For example, a user asked my mentor if a personal passport could be used as reliable evidence on Wikipedia. This is actually an issue that got explained during the tutorial videos, but my mentor did not say "RTFM" to him. Instead, her response demonstrated the maximum degree of "kindness and patience" as discussed by Kraut et al. She smoothly guided newcomers and provided suggestions for what they should do. She didn't just leave a link like WP: NPOV to let newcomers read these instructions but explained these community rules clearly. Even if someone asked her questions that were completely unrelated to the Wikipedia community, she still did not show "hostility or elitism" to that person. Because of her friendly attitude, I had the courage to ask her to review my article.

Design Claim 23
''"When old-timers provide newcomers formal mentorship, the newcomers become more committed to the community, learn how to behave in it, and contribute more". ''

My contribution to the community is limited but has been a gradual process of progress. At the beginning, when Dr. Reagle asked each of us to add citation and try copyright editing, I was still worried that my English writing ability and information retrieval ability might be inferior to that of the original author. So, I chose to only leave a detailed improvement suggestion on the talk page of an article(Special:Permalink/1139348563). However, maybe that editor already quit the Wikipedia community, so I never hear anything back from them. That frustrated me but also reminded me that I should reach out to old-timers instead of newcomers. As explained in Kraut et al.'s article, even if the new members do not cause damage to the community, the differences between the new members and the original community culture alone are enough to cause changes to the online community. Even if the inexperienced editor I first approached responded, her advice to me would probably be similar to my own understanding level or even worse. In other words, immature editors cannot give me a positive change and effective guidance for my subsequent behavior.

I can't agree more that the help of old-timers really helps new members integrate into an online community more quickly. Because it was very intuitive to see how my editing trends change and how often I get her feedback. The affirmation and feedback from the old-timers was the best technique for encouraging newcomers to consider contributing high-quality content more frequently. After receiving friendly and productive feedback from my assigned mentor, I finally know what I should do and have the courage to do it. The recognition of my content from older members let me feel that my contribution quality already met their expectations and confirmed that my current editing skills were at least not disruptive to the community. And her comments gave me more insight into how to contribute to the community more objectively, how to avoid some of my academic writing habits (like not needing to capitalize all first letters), and how to organize the content of my articles more logically.

Severe initiation process and entry barriers
Despite the supportive message and friendly editors’ help I received during the initiation process, there is no denying that the four months I spent trying to get involved in Wikipedia’s online community were still stressful and intimidating.

FODO (Fear of Disappointing Others)
Wikipedia has lots of complex community standards, and my contributions get scrutinized by more experienced editors. As a student editor, especially when contributing to the community in a second language in which I am not confident, I am afraid of offending others or making other editors think that I am intentionally undermining the community as a newcomer.

Here are a few mistakes I made without realizing it, all of which were pointed out by other editors:

After I made these mistakes, I frequently checked my Wikipedia notices to see if other editors had accused me of violating Wikipedia: NPOV guidelines and was afraid of being asked by other editors to RTFM. I even left a self-defensive discussion on Double Reduction Policy’s talk page to avoid anyone attacking me (link: Special:Permalink/1143420810). I shared my newbie identity to provide a reasonable “excuse” for my wrong behaviors. After reading Dr. Reagle’s discussion on the close correlation between FOMO and “belonging and social relatedness”, I came to realize that my FODO behavior was also rooted in my desire to assimilate into the Wikipedia community smoothly, and my intense need to belong encouraged me to still remain an active editor under stressful editing experiences.
 * 1) I used predatory sources accidentally. At first, I did not realize I was using a predatory source and harming the Wikipedia community. Because I did not have an extension/template in my settings to check whether the academic sources I used were trustworthy automatically. After that source got flagged as a predatory source by two editors and removed, then I finally realized they had violated community rules.  Link: Special:Diff/1147119141/prev
 * 2) I referred to several unreliable sources. But acknowledging my past knowledge is not applicable to the Wikipedia community is frustrating and a challenge to adopt because China Daily and CGTN are acceptable sources for my previous academic writing courses, and these two sources are the most reliable ones from Chinese students’ perspective. When I studied IB curriculum Chinese HL in high school, my instructor did not allow us to use BBC or New York Times as sources. Instead, she encouraged us to check China Daily or The Paper (the sister magazine of Sixth Tone) because they are considered the official voice of China and have an objective point of view. My Chinese background and past knowledge once let me hard to accept the fact that Sohu is more reliable than China Daily on Wikipedia community.

Edit War and Hounding
''*Note: I may consider removing the links referring to specific talk page after this reflection page is discussed in class because I don't want to cause unnecessary criticism. Thanks for understanding!''

I met an editor who was very keen on censoring China-related Wikipedia articles (to not offend this user I will refer him as "A"), He very kindly explained to me why he deleted all the content referring to sources like China Daily and CGTN. He gave very detailed explanations for each edit and provided me with corresponding tutorial page to help me know where to check if the source I used was reliable or not. However, after reading the WP:BURDEN link he provided me, I found that China Daily was not completely abandoned as a source, but should be used after conscious evaluation of specific situation and context. I began to question whether editor A was biased or overly sensitive to China-related sources.

So, I checked Editor A's edit history as well as his personal talk page. It turns out that he didn't spend enough time to understand the content of my article except for reviewing the sources I used. Editor A usually finished an edit in 1-2 minutes and all the edits are just deleting contents gathering from CGTN and China Daily. Editor A could prompt me to find more reliable sources for the content or leave suggestions for the improvement of my article on the talk page, but he only completed the review of information sources intensively and deleted all the information from China Daily and CGTN in my article. It is obvious that he did not think about the content of my contribution, but just wanted to find out whether there were any citations containing Chinese publications from my article.


 * Link for his edit summary:Special:Diff/1142849269/1143282655

Since I happened to be reading "The Tensions Behind Wikipedia's New Code of Conduct" that day, I began to realize that some editors frequently censor the pages of areas/ created by particular editors because of their hatred of particular issues. Based on Harrison's discussion of hounding behavior, I learned that some editors might destroy the community by deleting other editors' text contributions and using community rules to mask their own motives. So, I'm a little skeptical that Editor A's actions can be caused by his personal bias and undermined the Wikipedia community. Because there were already lots of biased discussions about China recently, so I became sensitive. However, since Editor A did not criticize me or do anything harmful to my page, I still tried to believe his action was in good faith and clicked the "thanks" button to express my thanks to him. Because I think his behavior may just want to help editors with Chinese backgrounds like me to eliminate our blind trust in China Daily or CGTN.

However, the presence of another editor (I will use “K” to represent him in the following reflection) brought the apparent edit war to my attention. I was curious about how Editor K could track down my newly created Double Reduction Policy page in such a short time and attempt to override a change Editor A made to my article citation. So, I rechecked Editor A’s talk page. And on March 25th, I was surprised that Editor K and Editor A had a severe dispute on Editor A’s talk page (Special:Diff/1149590989/prev). Editor K kept reminding Editor A of his wrong behavior of deleting China Daily sources and reported Editor A’s behavior to ANI. Based on the debate between these two editors on the talk page, I realized that Editor A’s behavior caused distress to many editors in this community. In order to understand the damage Editor A can cause in such a mature online community, I checked the archive, which contained all his most controversial edits (Special:Permalink/1149590987). Many resources and original paragraphs those wiki editors have spent much time on had been deleted without providing a reasonable reason or any communication. There are even some editors whose articles are added by Editor A with biased ideas. Editor A has also been repeatedly warned by the Wikipedia community that his actions have a negative impact and should be terminated. I gradually realized that Editor A’s actions, whether out of good intentions or bad intentions, had caused “frustration and distress” among editors interested in China topics. As a newcomer with little interest in the Wikipedia community, I was hesitant to contribute or devote much effort to providing objective knowledge after acknowledging this edit war and online “hounding” behavior.

The edit war I followed was like cold water quenching my newly kindled sense of active contribution, reinforcing my feelings of FODO. I was more afraid that others in the community would blame my immature edits, especially because as a newcomer I might be perceived as having a higher possibility to “pose real threats”. In addition, even knowing that I needed to solve the orphan problem of my article, I hesitated before finally summoning the courage to contribute to two already excellent articles. My personal feeling and constant tracking of this edit war made me even more determined to support the Wikimedia Foundation’s new “Universal Code of Conduct” because “Curbing malicious behavior” is very important. Malicious behavior will directly affect whether new users have to contribute, whether new users will continue to contribute to the Wikipedia community, and whether major contributors in the past would disengage from the community because of the hostile online community environment.

Result: Have a better commitment to Wikipedia
I will have to stop contributing to English Wikipedia after this capstone course because I am leaving the United States and returning to China soon. However, I am pretty determined that I will continue to contribute to the Chinese Wikipedia. I was surprised to find that even though my integration process was very challenging and slightly painful, I still built a strong connection, identity, and pride with this online community in the past four months.

Wanting to continue to contribute and stating hits publicly is beyond my initial expectations. When we learned in class that painful initiation experiences could influence people to be more likely to develop a commitment to the community and identify themselves as community members, I did not really agree with this design claim. I knew that painful experiences would make it easier for me to stay out of discussions and not engage with this online community. Moreover, Wikipedia had the famous “Don’t bite the newbie” rule. I personally didn’t expect to experience such a challenging initiation experience at all. However, after accidentally encountering the edit war, I did go through a period of hesitation, avoiding changing the content of other articles. I got trapped in my comfort zone and only contributed to two articles related to my article.

However, in the process of overcoming the entry barriers, the impact of sunk cost and cognitive dissonance affected my final decision and helped cultivate my belonging to the Wikipedia community.

First, my contributions to the community have far outweighed the benefits of quitting. I've completed the tutorials, contributed an original article to the community, provided suggestions from other community members, and devoted at least 6-10 hours a week to this work. So, rather than not contributing to the Wikipedia community anymore, I would instead continue contributing and applying the skills I have learned.

More importantly, I managed to convince myself that the act of making a contribution was meaningful and interesting after experiencing a stressful initiation. I did not want to review my article and look for opportunities to contribute to other topics for about two weeks. However, as I began to track the edit war and realized how many people were negatively affected by lousy editing practices, my understanding gradually began to change. Just as Elliot and Judson demonstrated, people could “convince themselves that the initiation was not very unpleasant” to reduce cognitive dissonance. I tried to convince myself that identifying discriminatory/biased behavior in the Wikipedia community and providing as much reliable information as possible was a way to help the community become normative. And that is my luck to know what should be regarded as suspicious edit behavior before I break the community rule accidentally. I didn’t enjoy an editing war on the Web, and I also did not want to contribute to the online community publicly. But I started to understand my behavior can help build this online community and reduce netizens’ one-sided understanding of China. In that case, my tough initiation experience was worthwhile, and it was a must-go-through process necessary to become a mature editor.

Solve orphan problem
Special:Diff/1149345105/prev

Special:Diff/1149335479/prev

When I saw that my article was flagged as an orphan, I opened the Orphan explanation and read it at least four times, but I could not fully understand how to solve this problem. What I understood was I needed to contain some categories and the "See also" section, which was totally wrong. This exposed another of the Wikipedia community's tough entry barrier for new comer: lengthy explanation of all possible situation and past examples. I do think Wikipedia provides a very detailed explanation of every problem and appreciate the fact that everyone can find solutions on the help page for any queries. However, it is also easy for new users to get overwhelmed with too much information at once. My final solution was to ask Dr. Reagle directly for a more straightforward explanation. It also reaffirms the importance of collective initiation and the need for new users to reach out to old-timers. If the old timers were as friendly as my mentor and Dr. Reagle, it would avoid the problem of new users not understanding or misunderstanding community rules.

I noticed although these two articles ranked as B, which was already high quality and important article, they were still missing recent policy. The education policy discussion needed to be updated because most examples were around 2010, and considerably of the content only contained negative perspectives. So, I tried to include how the double reduction policy is related to "Education inequality in China" and "tutoring" from a resource allocation perspective and the change of tutoring institutions’ business nature. I hope my discussion of this new policy implemented in 2021 and the addition of slightly positive information about China will give readers a more comprehensive understanding of China's policy-making.

Improve my own article & provide Peer Review
Special:Diff/1143282655/1149789232

Peer review for He Jiankui

Peer review for Food labelling and advertising law (Chile)

I've given a detailed discussion of the two types of feedback I've received. My mentor gave me a mixture of positive feedback and directive feedback. What I got from editor A who was involved in the edit war was mostly negative feedback on the sources I use. The experimental results showed that both negative feedback and directive feedback prompted newcomers to edit their original articles more actively. In particular, editors who received directive feedback were nine times as likely as to improve their articles as those who did not receive explicit feedback about the changes. I personally feel the motivation difference. After receiving the negative feedback, I mentally felt stressed, so I frequently checked what I could do to prove it. But after receiving the directive feedback, I became really productive and started searching for available and reliable resources. And I reorganized my article based on my mentor's feedback. She pointed out I didn't mention much about the effect/influences caused by the double reduction policy. So, I reviewed my article and sorted out all existing effect-related content. Then I found I totally missed what happened to the teachers specifically. From this example, you can easily tell how helpful old-timers' feedback within the Wikipedia community is. And based on the negative feedback, I was quite worried that the sources I used for the public sentiment part would be considered as unreliable again. So, I searched for more resources to improve the article's quality. Although the source-gathering process was quite stressful and time-consuming, the last version of Wikipedia content definitely got a clear improvement. After acknowledging the effectiveness of directive feedback and negative feedback, my peer review contained lots of directive feedback. However, based on how frustrated I feel after receiving negative feedback from others, I still keep containing positive feedback to keep the editors' general mental motivation.