User:ThomasSavage111/Win20 COM482 Wiki Report

First Suggestion
When a new member creates a Wikipedia account, that new user should be asked if they want to be paired with an experienced mentor. Kraut and Resnick state that when experienced editors provide newcomers mentorship, these newcomers become more committed to the community, better understand the norms and contribute more. When creating my article, I would have liked to have an experienced Wikipedia editor review my post in depth to make sure it would conform to expectations of the community beyond what I learned in WikiEdu. Within a couple of hours of making my edits public, an editor came through and severely changed my work. The photos in my article were shrunk and a lot of my work was deleted or moved around throughout the article. The editor commented that my article did not comply with “layout guidelines”, which was something I was not taught in WikiEdu. These large edits to my contribution make me feel like the time and energy I put into my work was wasted. This discourages me from making more edits in Wikipedia in fear that my future contributions will immediately be changed. These revisions make me feel slightly embarrassed because the article is live and other users can see my mistakes. If I had a mentor who could have positively purposed these changes in the privacy of my sandbox, I would have avoided the embarrassment and disappointment of seeing my work revised in a public space. According to Kraut and Resnick, when newcomers receive positive performance feedback, they become more motivated to complete tasks. Therefore, if a mentor were to work with me to create a contribution that was better received, I would be more likely to contribute in the future. However, this experience taught me that collaboration is important and that those who regularly contribute to Wikipedia are deeply committed to the community guidelines.

Second Suggestion
Wikipedia should create an easy way for people to share their contributions to social media channels. Examples of this include, creating a special link to the article with highlighted pieces of text that a specific editor added. This would make it easy for editors to share their hard work and contributions with friends. This allows editors to feel a sense of intrinsic gratification by asking friends to “look at the changes I made on Wikipedia”. After making my edits to the Wagner Houseboat, I would have loved to boast on Facebook about all my edits. Making work shareable is also important to recruit newcomers to the community. In Chapter 5 of Kraut and Resnick’s book they explain that recruiting new members from the social networks of current members is more powerful than any other impersonal method. Therefore, Wikipedia should allow their editors to share their work in the community on personal social media channels to increase visibility of the community and show others that they can easily contribute to Wikipedia just like their friends.

Third Suggestion
When editors create an account on Wikipedia, they should be asked about their interests and then recommended specific WikiProjects to participate in. This will help new editors narrow their focus within Wikipedia to find communities that they can commit to (both identity-based and bond-based) and find articles to edit. I had a very hard time finding a stub article to edit that interested me. In WikiEdu we were advised to look through categories, stubs, or lists of WikiProjects, but these pages contain an overwhelming amount of information to choose from. I began by trying to find an interesting WikiProject that might have a stub article I could use. However, after looking through the long list of “WikiProject Topics” I was taken to a “WikiProject Directory” with an even longer list of WikiProjects to choose from. There is too much information and decisions to be made. Instead of editing an article, I found myself sorting through long lists of article categories and deciding which category I like better. According to Kraut and Resnick, “providing easy-to-use tools for finding and tracking work that needs to be done increases the amount that gets done”. Therefore, if Wikipedia were to ask me broad questions about my interests, they could help me narrow down prospective WikiProjects and shorten the time it takes for me to find an article. Reducing the amount of time spent finding an article will help me complete more edits. Kraut and Resnick also say that personalized filters reduce the negative effect that uninteresting information has on identity-based commitment. Therefore, if Wikipedia can quickly direct me to a WikiProject that I am interested in, I will be more committed to the success of the project and contribute more. Simply asking new members their interests and directing them to WikiProjects they like, will increase total contributions to Wikipedia and build communities with higher numbers of more committed editors.

Class Concepts Applicable and Not Applicable to Wikipedia
Design claim 7 from chapter 4 of our book states, “A widely followed norm of ignoring trolls limits the damage they can do”. However, this norm is not relevant to Wikipedia because ignoring a troll would require intentionally leaving inaccurate information in an article. Information on Wikipedia must be accurate, so ignoring a person who is trolling an article would damage Wikipedia. For example, when trolls were editing Jeremy Renner’s Wikipedia page claiming he was a velociraptor. Jeremy Renner is not a velociraptor, therefore this spam should not be ignored by editors or left on his page. In fact, Wikipedia has reversion tools to help editors quickly and easily resolve these issues. Reversion tools are highlighted by Kraut and Resnick in their design claim 5 of chapter 4 about reversion tools and their ability to minimize a spammers damage. This is very important and applicable to Wikipedia because it allows editors to restore pages to their appropriate state very quickly. Reversion tools preserve all the accurate information and keeps it from being lost due to vandalism.