User:Xinya Gong/Report

Hi all Wikipedians, I am Xinya Gong who is a student editor in the online Communities course from the University of Washington. This course concentrates on the communities produced through digital communication networks and social media, as well as how people form communities, collaborate, and develop communities in digital environments. We are also involved in research and the utilization of online communities. Here is my report after I have contributed an article named Summer time (Roy Wang album) in the Wikipedia community. Based on our knowledge in class and my experience in the Wikipedia community, I am going to make some suggestions and arguments on this community to make it better for welcoming more contributors to involve in the Wikipedia community. To welcome and make the community more convenient to newcomers in the Wikipedia community, Wikipedia could build a new novice training tutorial on how to contribute to the Wikipedia community for the new users after they create a new Wikipedia account, and create a notification email for reminding the users that they have received the message from their Wikipedia talk page.

First of all, there might appear some inconvenient problems for the newcomers who want to contribute to the Wikipedia community. After the new users create a Wikipedia account, it does not show up a novice tutorial or accurate norms page for the newcomers. This might lead the new users to be confused about the norms and the way they can contribute to the Wikipedia community by scanning through the article on the main page. For instance, Although our professor has created a Wikipedia education page for our course that has helps me to get familiar with the Wikipedia community, I have met a lot of difficulties during the process of creating my articles page. Therefore, I think it is hard for the other newcomers to get used to the process of contributing to Wikipedia without those step-by-step training tutorials. I have noticed that there is a contribution section on the left of the main Wikipedia page showing the instructions for contributing to the community. The newcomers need to click on this section to get clear instructions on the policies and tutorials. Then, the training part is very small and at the end of the learn to edit subsection under the contribute section. Furthermore, it is hard for the new users to notice that they are receiving some messages on their own talk page or the articles talk page that they have contributed to. People can only see the messages the others have sent to them after they sign in to the Wikipedia user page, which might let the newcomers miss the message or not receive the message on time from people commenting on their talk page. For example, I have missed out on important advice by other Wikipedians talking about their concerns about choosing this specific topic and creating a page for my new article. When I saw the message, I had already started working on my articles. In my opinion, the section is not conspicuous enough and it is hard to get to the training tutorial page for the newcomers. Also, the new users are not familiar with the talk page so they might easily miss the message and the best time to respond to the message.

In addition, I am going to make some suggestions and arguments for making the Wikipedia community more convenient to newcomers. Firstly, to ensure the users can get the message on time and to notify the newcomers if they are getting the message, Wikipedia can send a notification email to the user at where some of the users have filled the email address. According to the knowledge in the course, the cost of joining this community is less so that can encourage new users to join the community. The cost for the newcomers of creating an account in the Wikipedia community is less, so we can not change the format by adding more additional requirements for people to join in. Therefore, the community can add one more recommended question for solving this problem. At the beginning of creating the Wikipedia account, the community can leave a comment at the recommended email address by asking if people would like to receive the notification for getting the message or not. This can ensure that if some new users do not want to get the email and also avoid creating any other additional requirements to join the Wikipedia community. Secondly, the community can create a new novice tutorial to let the newcomers become familiar with the norms and have more knowledge about how to contribute to the Wikipedia community. Lin et al. (2017) discovered that the Newcomers can also interrupt the community with too broad a range of interests, unfamiliarity with community norms, and relatively lower content quality (p. 9). According to the class material, the community can bring the concept of socialization to integrating and supporting the newcomers, which means teaching newcomers how to behave in ways that are appropriate or normative. Based on this circumstance, we need to give a clear guide to the newcomers to join the community. The community can create a new novice tutorial to show up after the newcomers created their Wikipedia account, just like a small training and norms session before going to the Wikipedia community. Also, the community can make this tutorial be saved for later or skip it to allow those users who are already really familiar with the Wikipedia community by closing up this introductory session. Those two suggestions might help the newcomers become more familiar with how to contribute to the Wikipedia community, let the newcomers have a better and more convenient experience in the Wikipedia community.

Reference
Kiene, C., Monroy-Hernández, A., & Hill, B. M. (2016). Surviving an "Eternal september". Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858356

Lin, Zhiyuan, Niloufar Salehi, Bowen Yao, Yiqi Chen, & Michael S. Bernstein. (2017). Better When It Was Smaller? Community Content and Behavior After Massive Growth. Proceeding of the Eleventh International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM17/paper/view/15628