User:Thekevanator/Report

1. Advice

One of the more frustrating things that I had difficulty with was editing the info box. It can be seen as a cornerstone for the page but as an editor I had difficulties with inputting information into the ‘template’. The doesn’t seems to be an easy way to add new elements to the box without changing the template. The established boxes are limited and the formatting can be hard for new users to catch onto. I also suggest labeling the icons so don't I need to play around and press every single one to get an idea of what their functionality was.

The left-hand column can be redesigned for more integrated use throughout the website. I didn’t utilize any of the links (contribute/tools/languages) during the course of this project and I wish I could have. I think having a personalized section with your articles and subpages can be useful and make for better organization.

The "coding" language instructions on Wikimedia still seemed intimidating to someone that doesn’t have a lot of experience with source code. I think including more "copy and paste" outlines for specific things for new users can be useful. Potentially including a "cheat sheet" page where users can come back to reference all actionable scripts.

I think implementing a preset page structure for every Wikipedia page could be helpful, so that new users have a baseline of where to go and not have as much inconsistency. This outline can potentially be made in reference to related well-polished articles and introduced in a Wikimedia learning module.

2. My Experience

Overall, I really enjoyed my experience with working on Wikipedia. Since I ran track and field here for the University of Washington, I thought I could pay tribute to my sprints coach who is a world class hurdler. I felt that his page didn't properly justify his accolades so by utilizing the platform I was able to help inform others about what kind of person Jeshua was. There was a lot of research that went into expanding on the page. Starting with his achievements at big meets, I was able to lay out the groundwork for the general timeline of his career. When looking into his meet times, I saw that most of the secondary sources had reported the same times which was really reassuring, but that wasn't always the case. Something that I learned throughout the process was to still always check multiple sources. Even if the information that I found was from what seemed like a reliable source, I was still able to find some inconsistencies after further digging. Writing out the article and eventually publishing it gave me a really accomplished feeling, knowing that I helped contribute to the vast amount of knowledge that is stored and shared through this website. There wasn't any changes or feedback that I was able to observe after publishing my edit, but I will certainly check in from time to time to see feedback from the Wikipedia community. This is another thing I learned: the thoroughness of Wikipedians are overlooked. Going into this class I had the perception that Wikipedia was always an unreliable source of information, just like my junior high teachers. After completing this assignment, I realize the accountability that everyone is held to in this community and it makes me want to advocate it for those that are still under that misconception. Of course, there will be always be trolls and users that don't respect the guidelines but that is inevitable in every community.

3. Application

After studying the Facebook case I was able to understand what Normative/Bond commitment was. This is the process in which people contribute to a topic of interest similar with others in order to try and achieve a greater good or creating a sense of community. I think that creating a more opinion-based subgroup to Wikipedia where people can input personal experiences to topics can help drive commitment across articles. Expanding on the "talk" pages so that it’s not used just for feedback for articles, but also a place where people can create relationships and share ideas that don’t directly relate to the subject at hand. I realize that Wikipedia is designed to be an informational website but by driving up the commitment of users, the amount of information shared can be greatly beneficial. We saw in the Defaulting Reddit case, that opening up the space for too many people can also have many potential drawbacks, but through diligent monitoring and clear guidelines, the risks can be mitigated. Now referring to the Zooniverse case, I was enlightened by the concept of Deeply Engaged vs. Lightly Engaged. I recommend for Wikipedia to cater to the more lightly engaged users (those that don’t contribute as much), by featuring some stub or low click rate articles for them to contribute to. It can be less intimidating for a new user to start learning how to edit with those, similar to how we started in this class.

My recommendations should be taken more seriously because we have been working on this platform for many weeks now and I have a clear understanding of the interpersonal aspects of this community. As well as being able to compare it to other cases that I have discussed above. Drawing from similarities and differences of multiple online communities can help carve out a general sense of what functional aspects are essential to making an online community succeed.

4. Reflection

All of the cases and applications from this class seem to only discuss forum-based communities so I would love to see how other communities like YouTube, Instagram, Vimeo and other “media based” interactions affect how the norms of interpersonal communication differ/stay the same. However, Wikipedia and Wikimedia certainly give a really good introduction as to how different users interact in an online community.