User:Torma616/OC Wiki Reflection

For my Online Communities capstone class, I was asked to examine the nature of online communities - what it takes to build them, what it takes to maintain them, what exactly it is that makes them a community rather than just a random collection of people, etc. While a lot of what was discussed in the class could be provided to offline, or "IRL," communities as well, we honed in our focus by spending a lot of time specifically working with the online community Wikipedia. I was asked not only to observe the community that is Wikipedia, but also to become a contributing member (or "Wikipedian," as we Wikipedians like to say) to the community by creating an article of my very own. While I'd done this once before, for another one of my classes at Northeastern University, this time was different; last time, I was just assigned to write an article, however in this class, I was immersed in Wikipedia, with the focus being on the community first and the article second. While admittedly maddening at times, this assignment has really made me come to appreciate Wikipedia for the community that it is – a living, breathing entity with a lot of structure and not just a random collection of information that people were bothered enough to write down. For this assignment, I decided to write an article on The First Church in Roxbury, because I saw that it was a requested article, I live down the street from it and I used to love history class in high school – a subject I haven’t been able to take while in college.

Growing Pains
Wikipedia has a lot of tools in place to help the hopeless newbie out when they’re first getting started. Upon enrolling in our class page, I received a message from an ambassador, Ian, from the Wiki Education Foundation with some helpful links to help me get started. On one hand, I thought that these were great. Some of the links that I needed from the start were right there, collected in a convenient place for me to use. On top of that, I felt like I had some sort of a personal connection with Ian; I never messaged him back, likely because I had Prof. Reagle to answer questions I had. However, if I didn’t have the resources that I had available, I would have definitely felt like messaging Ian back with questions would be more effective than Googling to try figuring out the answers myself or posting a question to a general group of people online. Kraut and Resnick (2011), in their book “Building Successful Online Communities” claim that in order to encourage contribution to a community, “providing easy-to-use tools for finding and tracking work that needs to be done increases the amount that gets done.” Furthermore, the authors suggest that, "Providing members with specific and highly challenging goals, whether self-set or system-suggested, increases contribution." In this first interaction with Ian, this is exactly what occurred – he sent me a message with links to all the information I would need to get started, eliminating the feeling that I needed to undertake the daunting task of finding out all of the information on my own (the learning curve for figuring out Wikipedia’s organization, at least to me, seems pretty high). By providing the information, I was being given a specific, highly challenging goal - make a worthwhile contribution to Wikipedia. This seemed to me to be a good way for the Wikipedia community to make me intrinsically motivated to contribute because I want to be part of the community, rather than extrinsically motivated to contribute because I was given an assignment.

Writing the Article
With the welcoming pleasantries out of the way, it was now time for me to begin my contributions as a Wikipedian, by selecting a topic for an article of my own. I wanted to pick a topic that I was interested in, because I knew that it would be the easiest for me to write an article about something I was passionate. However, at the same time, I felt like I just needed to select a topic and that it was more important to just have a topic than to find “the perfect topic.” I took at look at a list of the Requested Articles to find inspiration as to what topic I should tackle for my article. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, choosing an article from this list of requests also encouraged me as a user to find the intrinsic motivation to come back and edit it. Kraut and Resnick (2011) suggest that “identity based commitment makes people more compliant with norms than does bonds-based commitment.” The authors also state that, “Providing a collection of individuals with a name or other indicator that they are members of a common group increases their identity-based commitment to the community.” By selecting the article from the “Requested Articles” list, I was forging my own identity as a Wikipedian; instead of just contributing where I felt like it to wikipedia, I felt like I was taking on this project more for the community than for myself. After all, I didn’t want to let my fellow Wikipedian’s down – they asked for this article and, as a Wikipedian, I wanted to do a good job so that my contribution to the community would be worthwhile. The act of writing an article and choosing a topic from the list of required articles helped me to feel like I was able to settle into this community. Because I was working on a topic that didn’t really interest my all that much, but had been requested for, it really helped me form an identity as a Wikipedian, rather than just a random contributor to this website, and encouraged my continued commitment to contribution on Wikipedia.

The Five Pillars of Wikipedia
As Wikipedians, we learned that the fundamental principals of Wikipedia could be expressed in the following five-part summary: Wikipedia 1) is an encyclopedia 2) that is written from a neutral point of view, that the 3) content is free for anyone to use, edit and distribute. Editors are expected to 4) treat each other with respect and civility, and finally everybody is reminded that 5) Wikipedia has no firm rules. These Five Pillars of Wikipedia helped me, as a new Wikipedian, to become accustomed or familiar with what it is that makes Wikipedia, Wikipedia. These Five Pillars serve as a loose guideline for the principals that the entirety of Wikipedia is based on. Wikipedia tells us to "treat each other with respect and civility," which, other than being just general good advice for life, really appeals to the fact that Wikipedia is an example of a "good faith community," suggesting users should "assume good faith on the part of others.". Wikipedia tells us that, “Wikipedia has no firm rules,” Kraut and Resnick (2011) tell us that, “Consistently applied moderation criteria, a chance to argue one’s case, and appeal procedures increase the legitimacy and thus the effectiveness of moderation decisions.” Truly, even though Wikipedia has “no firm rules,” it also has a high standard for self-moderation, and Wikipedians put a lot of effort into holding themselves to that high standard despite the lack of official, firm rules. Because Wikipedians care enough about their self-moderation, it leads to mostly legitimate and effective moderation decisions to be made.

Community Interaction
Unfortunately, not everything went as planned, and I had limited interaction with other Wikipedians on my article. Even though I tried to make sure my article was not an orphan in the Wikipedia namespace, I think that a lack of information on the page is generally was caused other Wikipedians to not contribute (I tended to add large amounts of information at once instead of small amounts over a long period of time). If I had more drafts to share with Wikipedia, I could have drummed up some more attending and possibly had some other community interaction on my article by way of editing. I think I was a bit hesitant to draw attention to my article because it was very much a work in progress, and my years of school in the “complete assignment, receive feedback” system of education led to me fearing the possibility of people seeing my unfinished work. To me, the norm was that I would be able to finish an assignment and then submit it for reviewing and grading. However, due to the nature of Wikipedia, this was impossible – any update made to my page was instantly public for all the world to see. However, I wasn’t completely ignored by my fellow Wikipedians; some helped out with simple edits like problems, which were all appreciated by my, no matter how small the edit. I was happy to see that there were others in the community who were interested in my article being as good as possible as well as myself.

Conclusion
After spending the semester in Wikipedia, specifically looking at what it is that makes Wikipedia a successful online community, it is very evident that Wikipedia practices several of the design claims presented by Kraut & Resnick (2011) throughout their book. The assignment of immersing ourselves in the Wikipedia community and contributing with an article allowed us to get an up close look at how an online community operates on various levels, from dealing with newcomers, to getting us newcomers involved, to keeping us newcomers around, etc. I feel like if I were doing this project on my own, not as a class assignment, it would have never gotten done – like I mentioned earlier, the learning curve for Wikipedia seems high enough that I wouldn’t have wanted to put the effort in on my own, but because I was doing this for a class assignment, I had the extrinsic motivation to keep coming back. My experience wasn’t the norm; I had the help of professors where most people wouldn’t have those “IRL” resources. At the end of the day, I definitely appreciated Reagle giving us this assignment, because it was a chance to think outside the box of a traditional research assignment and do to something that exists in the public space for as long as somebody bothers to maintain it – this is one assignment that won’t just get lost when I throw out old papers after graduating.