User:Toothlesswalrus/Reflection

Introduction
Overall, I have had a largely positive experience editing and contributing on Wikipedia. The users that I have engaged with have been helpful in building up my page to be the best that it can be. They have offered valuable insight into both what my article does well and what could be improved. However, I have found that while Wikipedia is a healthy and flourishing online community, the website can still be overwhelming for newcomers. If it were not for the assigned tasks that are part of the WikiEdu dashboard, I personally do not know where I would start as a new Wikipedian. Certain features and guidelines like welcome messages on talk pages and WP:DNB are helpful in making new Wikipedians feel accepted in the community, but other improvements could still be made in this regard.

Contribution
My primary contribution to Wikipedia was the undecuple meter article. It is a rather technical article relating to music theory, but this is an area that I have prior experience in as well as a topic I enjoy writing about. I chose this article because while English Wikipedia has various articles on individual unusual time signatures, there was no article on these specific time signatures despite it being a requested article. Additionally, French Wikipedia already had an article on the topic that I was able to use as a reference for structure and examples.

I began working on the first draft of my article in my personal userspace. Before receiving approval to move my article into mainspace, I made minor contributions to the gin and Open Book Collective articles. For the former, I added a citation where a [ citation needed] tag was present, and for the latter, I added categories so that it would no longer be uncategorized. In both cases, subsequent edits were made to these articles without modifying my own contributions to these articles. While my edits were not explicitly mentioned by other users, the fact that my changes were not immediately reverted made me feel like my contributions had value to them. No news is good news, I suppose. These edits helped me get acclimated to editing Wikipedia, and they served me well in building up my confidence as a new Wikipedian. And while it appears that the Open Book Collective article might be deleted soon, I am happy to have offered my contributions while I was able to.

I moved my of my article into mainspace fairly early on. Initially, I did not receive much feedback for my work on the article. I believe this is because I did not link my article to any applicable related pages, making it orphaned in the process. However, in checking the pages that linked to my article, I found a userpage that ranked new articles based on Wikipedia's content assessment criteria. My article was given a C-Class rating. I was curious what could be improved in my article to improve this rating, and I wanted to reach out to this user to ask them about their rationale. However, I soon realized that this user was a bot who likely would not be responsive to my questions.

Because of the initial lack of attention my article received, I specifically reached out to two other Wikipedia users for feedback on my article. I chose these two users in particular because they had both contributed extensively to similar articles. The first user focused much of their work on the list of musical works in unusual time signatures page, which they explicitly mention on their userpage. I left them a comment on their talkpage asking if they would be willing to take a look at my article, and they quickly responded offering their feedback within a few hours. They believed that the article was off to a good start, but advised that I include a section on my topic's usage in folk music. They were also able to point me in the right direction for resources on Wikipedia related to this aspect of my article, which was very helpful. The second user was seemingly a frequent editor of the quintuple meter page. Similarly, I left him a message asking if he could review my article. Within a few days, I received a message on my own talkpage with his feedback. I would describe both of these interactions that I directly had with other Wikipedians as both positive and constructive. I also thanked another Wikipedian for their edits to the Team Fortress 2 article, as they made multiple grammatical changes to the page that made it easier to read.

Currently, the last outstanding task relating to my article is finalizing a merge request between my article and the gankino horo article. So far, nobody has contributed to the discussion on my article’s talk page either in favor of or against the merger. One piece of feedback I received is that this section could be viewed as redundant in light of the Kopanitsa section, although I think a proper merger could provide the necessary information necessary to differentiate the two.

Recommendation
As I alluded to in my introduction, I felt very overwhelmed initially contributing to Wikipedia as a new editor. Wikipedia works entirely differently from any other website that I have been a part of. It uses a lot of esoteric formatting requirements and social norms, usually codified in the form of WP: and a following assortment of letters. Additionally, my status as a newcomer made me hesitant to reach out to others for any potential assistance. As a result, I suggest that Wikipedia further encourage new users to make edits by creating a dashboard of smaller contributions these new users can make to become acclimated to the contribution process. My first two mainspace edits to the gin and Open Book Collective articles were two simple and (more importantly) low-stakes changes that realistically anyone could do. Nonetheless, these edits were instrumental in developing my knowledge of the Wikipedia editing process. Articles like these that need attention are unfortunately relegated to certain "maintenance" categories that newcomers might not know to look out for, and I believe they should be brought to the forefront for these users' purposes. An easy to access dashboard for new users would be very helpful in directing them towards these types of edits.

There are still positive things that Wikipedia does to benefit newcomers that could potentially be expanded upon in some respects. One of these being Wikipedia's welcome messages that are left on newcomers' talkpages by experienced members of the community. Kraut et al.'s Building Successful Online Communities even points to Wikipedia's welcoming committee as an example of the work's design claims in practice. Kraut et al.'s Design Claim 19 for dealing with newcomers notes that "[one] technique to encourage initial positive interaction between newcomers and old-timers is to assign welcoming responsibilities to designated old-timers." These welcome messages typically serve as new users' first exposure to the larger Wikipedia community, and will likely be the first interaction they have with someone else on the website. I think a useful small change to this system could be to display a tooltip over the message when they first view this welcome message encouraging them to give a quick reply. This would encourage new users to directly interact with another user in a positive manner while not being overbearing.

I think it is important that whatever Wikipedia does (if anything at all) to improve the newcomer experience on the website, it is important that those making the changes consider Wikipedia's express purpose and general place within the internet ecosystem. I believe that any form of gamification would go against Wikipedia's design philosophy and could potentially dissuade or alienate existing users. This is a sentiment echoed by Alfie Kohn in his book Punished by Rewards, in which he writes "[if] our goal is quality, or a lasting commitment to a value or behavior, no artificial incentive can match the power of intrinsic motivation." If Wikipedia were to introduce tangible incentives for contributing, the quality of contributions would likely decrease. I believe that a large part of Wikipedia's success as a website is its emphasis on intrinsically-motivated volunteer contributions. Introducing extrinsic rewards to Wikipedia would significantly affect how users and contributors edit articles in a negative way.

As a website seeking to offer an eclectic, encyclopedic source of information, perhaps Wikipedia should not make amends with current design trends and not make significant changes to its general structure. I believe that the recommendations I have offered do not significantly alter or otherwise go against this design philosophy.

Conclusion
To summarize my thoughts on editing Wikipedia over the course of this semester, it has been a positive but daunting experience for me. Having a page on this website that was first started by me feels like a great accomplishment, even if everyone else could theoretically do it as well. I hope to continue contributing to Wikipedia even after the conclusion of this class, although I am sure many others have said the same before. I will likely start by merging the gankino horo article into my own in the coming weeks, making that article redirect to undecuple meter in the process. I do not have any plans for a wholly original article right now, but I would be happy maintaining the undecuple meter article and editing other articles as needed.