User:Violetzq/Win20 COM482 Wiki Report

I use Wikipedia as a source of information all the time, but actually contributing to an article on this site has been a brand new experience for me. Knowing that everyone can edit on Wikipedia, I never thought I had the motivation to do it. However, now I believe I found plenty of joy in writing and editing articles thinking about the fact that I can help deliver more information to the public about someone I really care about. The article that I chose is “Code Kunst”, and he is a very unique and talented Korean music producer. The love and interest I have for him made the whole editing process much more intriguing to me, even though there is very little written record about him so I had to watch many interviews in Korean and translate some of them back to English (I have taken some Korean classes and am still learning Korean myself). On the other hand, there are some downsides to my passion as well. We learned from WikiEdu at the very beginning of class that articles on Wikipedia need to maintain a neutral and formal tone. I had some difficult time making my article more informative instead of trying to persuade my audience about how talented I think this person is. As a starter in Wikipedia, I was used to listing random facts. Through the practice of writing on Wikipedia, I learned many techniques about how to make my article more coherent and logical by combining the pieces of information together.

Through my experience and what we learned in classes so far, I do have some advice for Wikipedia. First of all, as we discussed in class, there are a lot more readers than contributors on Wikipedia, and the number of contributors are still declining these years. Besides the people who do not even know they can contribute to Wikipedia, there might be a lot of people who lack the motivation for editing, just like me at the beginning. We learned that intrinsic factors such as personal interest and simply “having fun” can be a strong motivation for participation. I want to share how I got my intrinsic motivation for editing before giving my advice to reason why I think it will be effective. I was not sure whether I should pick this article “Code Kunst” when I just started the project. Coincidentally, one day I saw Code Kunst posting on his Instagram himself about someone added on a Wikipedia article listing him as one of the “promising young Korean Hip-Hop producers”. That was when I got really motivated to add to Code Kunst’s article because I realized that it means something to him, and I can help more people who are interested get more information about him since there was only one paragraph in the original “Code Kunst” article. I noticed that Wikipedia writes “this article is a stub, you can help Wikipedia by expanding it” to encourage people to make contributions. My advice is to simply add a line “you can help this person/object by sharing more informative contents to people who are interested.” This can offer an intrinsic motivation for people who care and love the person/object/location. It helps people develop interest in contributing, and it can also help people get a sense of personal value because it makes them realize that their contribution means something to the person/object that the article writes about. It also conveys a message that they can help get more people to love what they love by simply sharing more information, which is also an intrinsic motivation.

Another advice that I have for Wikipedia in order to get more people to contribute is to have a “recommend a friend” option, and offering rewards to users who recommend their friend to edit articles. This is the “organic ‘word of mouth’ recruitment” we mentioned in class. I think it is a plausible strategy because since it is not mandatory, it gives people the freedom to choose whether to recommend their friends or not. If people choose to do it, they must be recommending it to friends who trust them, and therefore are more likely to participate and contribute. It can also help develop a bond-based community and enhance commitment. Moreover, the “Stack Exchange” case study we discussed in class also used this technique as the users are asked to invite their friends to help build the community, and I think it worked pretty well for them. Even though Wikipedia is a very different community, offering some rewards as extrinsic motivation for users who recommend their friends can be a useful strategy.

I think one of the very unique things about Wikipedia is that everyone is allowed to make changes to Wikipedia articles. Since there is this unique “freedom” for Wikipedia, more rules and regulations are needed for Wikipedia to maintain order and peace, which is also relevant to the “maintaining order in online community” we learned in class. Wikipedia developed a pretty complete system to maintain order already, but I do think the fact that everyone can easily delete the content you put a ton of effort in can be a little frustrating. If I were to offer advice, I would recommend having the users discuss a little bit with the original contributor before they can deleting content, and this only applies to users who want to delete a large amount of content (with a specific word limit). This way it can avoid excessive works for contributors, while also avoid having new users lose their motivation to contribute further because of their works getting deleted.

One of the major things I got from this experience besides writing skills is the joy of contributing to a subject I’m truly interested as a student in communication. Through the process of the course, I have put many thoughts using the class material trying to think of ways to help people and online community I love and am currently in. Since I’m really interested in Kpop, I will carry what I learned so far and really think about how to take them into the field of Kpop industry and Kpop fans community.