User:TylerOliver7/Report

This quarter, I had the privilege of editing a wikipedia article in order to improve the quality of the article and experience what being apart of the wikipedia community is like. Although I have used wikipedia throughout my life, this was the first time I had edited wikipedia and also the first time I had created a wikipedia account. This experience was was very important for learning about how online communities function and showed how even the biggest of online communities rely on the smallest individual users to succeed.

As with all online communities, wikipedia has to deal with creating norms and regulations to ensure commitment to the community and contributions from its members, while still allowing for newcomers to get involved. This is a challenge for all online communities, and it can be hard to implement so many rules while still maintaining high participation. From the outside, it appears as though Wikipedia does a really good job at keeping its members engaged and helping out new users, but there is a lot more that can be done to improve. For example, as a member of the class I was given access to Wiki Edu and all the resources that come along with it. It was very helpful in ensuring I knew the basics of wikipedia and the modules do a really good job at laying out how wikipedia functions. However, most users do not have access to this so it may be a little scary to start editing for new users. I would suggest that wikipedia allows all of its new and existing users to have access to resources such as this. Taking away the intimidation factor while also clearly outline rules and norms would be a great way to improve wikipedia. Also, it may seem that Wikipedia does a really good job at keeping its users engaged and contributing, but this is not really the case. While doing research for my article, I remember coming across a fact that showed just how many of the articles on wikipedia fall in 'sub' or 'stub' classifications meaning they have very little information added to them. Of course we expect to see these articles improve overtime, but I think there is a very crucial idea that wikipedia can incorporate that would help see a lot of articles improve in quality. Wikipedia users have no incentive to make contributions and this is a problem that can easily be remedied. I believe wikipedia should add some form of gamification to ensure that users stay involved and want to keep improving other articles. If we look at communities like reddit and stack exchange, we can see how adding point systems can improve the quality of interactions. Not only does it support quality posters because they will have a sort of score connected to their account, it can be a good way to encourage new users to make edits to improve their score. I think the best way to do this would be to create a point system that rewards people every time they makes a quality contribution to an article, start a new article, or comment on another user's edits. I do not think they should make it entirely based off of other users upvoting or downvoting because that would not really fit the encyclopedic nature of wikipedia. They also have to make sure to be careful because adding this system could cause people to make improper edits or not do as much research before posting just because they are chasing high scores. Overall, I believe adding a point system would greatly benefit the engagement and contributions to wikipedia. In class, we have seen how the addition of incentives provide more reasons for user to come back to communities and remain involved.

The article I chose to edit was the Stadium Bowl, a sports stadium in my hometown of Tacoma, Washington. I actually went to school here and was able to play four years of football at this stadium so it was a very easy article for me to connect to and want to improve. Having the Wiki Edu was very helpful in learning the basics of wikipedia, but I do think that in general the edit function of wikipedia is pretty simple to get the hang of. Having read countless wikipedia articles over the years, it felt very rewarding to contribute to an article for the first time, but other than being a class requirement I would not see myself adding to wikipedia on my own. This could tie back into my ideas of adding a point system to incentivize users to contribute. On another note, a majority of my writing experience has been writing argumentative or expository essays, so I think the experience of writing in an encyclopedic nature was very beneficial for my writing skills. I think Wikipedia is unique in that sense that it is a formal community because it is an encyclopedia but it encourages everyone to add meaningful information so that we can all benefit from increased knowledge.

In conclusion, I think the wikipedia sections of this course are very valuable. I enjoyed the experience of becoming a contributing member of a community which I have lurked in for so long. One thing wikipedia needs to improve is bridge this gap between lurkers and contributors. I believe this can be accomplished by adding modules for all users to see, and by creating a point system to reward its frequent users.