User:Yennilee/Report

Prior to this Wikipedia project and COM 482, I took for granted how integral online communities have been in my life. I have never reflected on what my contributions to online communities are, how they are created based on various designers’ intentions, and how this is a relatively new realm of community that many people, including me, take for granted. This experience has given me insight into the intricacies of online communities and looking forward, I plan to be more deliberate in how I participate in them.

In this project, I had the chance to select an article that I thought could be improved, create several drafts in my sandbox, give others peer reviews and get peer reviewed, and add my contributions to the live article. This process gave me a sense of the normal workflow of a Wikipedian and helped me understand why the structure is so important to the success of the community too. Not only did it show me the broad community ideas, but it allowed me to reflect on my role as a consumer and possible long-time contributor to online communities in general.

Through this project and the experience of learning to contribute to the Wikipedia community, I have changed many of my expectations of an online community and have learned a lot about my personal style when interacting with such platforms. In the traditional sense of a community and in most of my experiences with them, my expectations are that I feel a sense of belonging and security and am able to reach out to any one person to get all the information I need. For standard communities, I also value having one or several leaders to confide in and put my trust into developing or maintaining the community is important because that will ensure its longevity. From an accessibility standpoint, I always want to have access to those leaders as well to make sure that my voice is heard and my needs are addressed, even if I rarely exercise that.

What is different about the Wikipedia community is that it relies a lot on volunteers and trust. Wikipedia is a massive online encyclopedia that anyone, if they so choose, can contribute to its development. Due to the nature of Wikipedia and its purpose, it is vital that there is not a singular viewpoint that is projected amongst the whole community because it needs to thrive through inclusivity and usefulness, but also have systems to filter out bad behavior. My experience with writing an article was eye-opening because I felt that my work was meaningful and that the community values my voice, and especially since people are going to read my work, there is some stress involved because I want to do it well. That taught me that especially for communities that exist on the internet, the way I conduct and represent myself will be scrutinized no matter if it is good or bad because ultimately, I have a lot of reach and influence. That goes for everyone else who chooses to participate, so online communities are just as valuable if not more than normal communities.

Given the success of Wikipedia as an online community and its modern-day usefulness, there is little that I have to suggest to improve this community. However, based on my experiences as a contributor and user of other communities, there are a few things that if I had the influence or authority to change, I would try to.

As a newcomer to Wikipedia and attempting to contribute to the massive database, the tasks and training were a little daunting even though the interface allowed me to explore and go at my own pace. To improve this part of the experience, my recommendation would be for the Wikimedia Foundation to invest more resources into making this onboarding portion more user-friendly to retain its newcomers. As a user, I also had trouble understanding the options and what I was capable of adding or deleting from an article as soon as I went over to Wikipedia from Wikiedu. Because I was too afraid to mess up, I would like to have some other place to practice all the actions—creating a new sandbox, doing research, changing content within the sandbox, and moving that sandbox content over to the live article in. A training or a precursor to the sandboxes would be nice for that part, or perhaps a walkthrough or simulator where users can click from dropdowns for the right action, get immediate systematic feedback, or puzzle through the different options with content made from a fake article.

Following some of the suggestions from the Building Successful Online Communities book, I think that Wikipedia could also benefit from creating recommender systems or more navigation aids to not only provide users with similar articles to work on that they may be interested in, but also having them to help people navigate the general tasks of Wikipedia, regardless of whether it is for newcomers or seasoned contributors. This will promote efficiency and also deter people from leaving the community if they struggle with tasks like I did. Wikipedia could also benefit from specifically incentivizing more people to mentor or at least initiate friendly interactions with newcomers because it will encourage a sense of belonging and care for other members.

What makes Wikipedia unique is its volunteer-based contributions. Although we did not in this project address the impacts of Wikipedia competitors or increasing intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to retain people and their commitment in the community, a lot can be said through Wikipedia’s success in already having thousands of contributors on the site. Even though I have never had to think deeply about what constitutes a successful online community, after being a newcomer and contributor in the Wikipedia community, I have a newfound respect for the work that is done to ensure this resource is available to many people.