User:VQuiche/Report

This article was the first time I’ve ever sat down and contributed information and knowledge to a topic, let alone a topic that I find very interesting. Visiting the site with guiding figures significantly helped me appreciate the resource that is Wikipedia. Years of schooling taught me how to refer to information that I gathered externally and so the biggest culture-shock was the switch from being able to quote a source and cite it, to taking that source, learning about it, and then writing it in my own neutral language. Through the processes and resources I had this quarter, I was able to break through the conditioned writing that I had learned through my fifteen-some years of school. That’s not to say that I didn’t learn anything else because almost everything was new to me; finding the types of sources valid to Wikipedia, formatting using their text-editor, obtaining rule-abiding images, and the entire process of putting it all together for the whole world to see was all new despite some gripes.

My biggest piece of constructive criticism is with how a user would navigate through the website. A lot of the work I did was under my own user page but navigating to that article was difficult at first because of the indexing that I’d been accustomed to from the other things I use in life. For example, in my Windows explorer or in Github I’m able to go to my “userpage” and then see the folders/projects under that directory, and upon clicking to navigate downwards I can see more and more sub-folders and files, all while being able to navigate upwards too. Wikipedia doesn’t list the users’ articles underneath the user page, but when I first started on the class’s assignments there were times where I’d go to my user page and panic due to not seeing anything indicating that there were paths beyond “User:VQuiche/” which made me think that I hadn’t saved my work. I ended up learning that I could just manually type the article into the URL after my name.

I knew of the “contributions” tab up in the top right but that wasn’t necessarily the answer to my problem due to the fact that it shows everything that I’d published, and so there were a lot of the same articles appearing than just a list of articles created by me. This may be due to power users who have many articles under them though, so it may have already been considered. Additionally my biggest frustration while editing my article was trying to get the images to behave how I wanted to. It’s as frustrating to use as Microsoft Word and the UI clues such as the grey line where the photo will be aligned with wasn’t clear enough. Instead of me clicking the image and moving it around to see where it can by trial and error, I would like to have some sort of grid that shows me everywhere that I can align it.

The reason that I specified these issues is because Wikipedia--in my experience--isn’t very new-user-friendly. We discussed user attraction and retention in terms of nurturing an active community and yet a site that prides itself on freely available knowledge has a plethora of convoluted guidelines for posting. Other sites have many guidelines too but due to the navigation problem aforementioned, it would make it hard for a user who’d instinctively expect the same navigation structure to transition their learned skills to Wikipedia. The guidelines for how to contribute are hidden under the “About Wikipedia” article under the left sidebar, which many wouldn’t think to look for since many other communities have some sort of “FAQ and Posting rules” sections.

Not only is the location of posting guidelines vague for new users, but within the article itself creates even more confusion. The “About Wikipedia” page lists the general rules and principles behind their content, but under each section are other articles pertaining to specifics of the rules such as “Contributing to Wikipedia” or “Your first article”. I counted the links and there were fourteen external articles that are all required readings for a new user to learn how to contribute to the site without having their content taken down by veteran users who use “industry-slang” in their comments which makes it even more confusing and frustrating. A new user shouldn’t have to have fourteen tabs opened in order to learn how to contribute and this only acts as a very big hurdle for people to get through.

I also mentioned veteran users taking down contributions and I do think that there’s a sense of “elitism” in the revisions that I saw when initially exploring articles. A lot of the articles I saw had editorial comments that used a lot of “Wiki-lingo”. This can be confusing for new users who’ve still yet to memorize the fourteen tabs of posting guidelines, making it so that someone who did pass the fourteen-tab-hurdles is further compelled to not contribute again. It’s hard to assume the lingo that new users are unaware of though so the solution seems relatively simple: revise the guidelines on publishing comments so that every revision comment is clearer to every party.

These aspects are the most pertinent to me because there’s no interpersonal communication within a system if the system itself has no users. Wikipedia obviously has no need to worry about this due to how widely used and contributed it is, but as mentioned by Professor Hill: all it takes for a community to implode is for one “civil war '' within the user base. It’s also to be considered that Wikipedia may not necessarily need to abide by the theories that we covered due to how the interactions between the users happen in the background in form of talk pages, rather than on sites like Reddit where the core purpose of the site is for users to interact in the foreground.