User:YixuanLong/Report

What did I do and learn?
When I first logged in Wikipedia as a contributor, I was impressed by how this encyclopedia was created and maintained by people’s collaboration in this community and how crowdsourcing forms and benefits the community. Based on what I have learned from class, I divided my Wikipedia experience into different stages when making contributions in this community and analyzed how the community features work in each stage.

As a newcomer, I followed the instructions in the orientation, which showed me a clear path of how to contribute in this community. It demonstrates the exact steps to create articles and edit pages, which serves as a motivation and a guide to new editors in the community, so that we can get involved in this community quickly without figuring it out by ourselves. Moreover, the requested articles and the list of stubs provide a way to encourage community members to find what they are interested in and then make contributions, as stated in one of the design claims in the book Building Successful Online Communities(BSOC) ‘making the list of needed contributions easily visible increases the likelihood that community will provide them.’

When I started my contribution, I first created article in my sandbox, a place where the content is not regarded as official in Wikipedia and could cause less harm to the real Wikipedia articles as well as community if the content contains improper pieces of information. It provides a ‘safe area’ for me to practice editing and get used to the writing principles, which can also strengthen my retention in this community.

In contributing to the community, the part I paid the most attention to is Wikipedia’s norms and guidelines. They ensure the existence of current articles and maintain the operation of both Wikipedia and its communities. In editing articles, source evaluation and copyright protection were the two elements I cared the most because they are the reason why all these Wikipedia articles can be created and recognized as reliable references for people online. Knowing what can be done and what cannot, the rules helped me to contribute more effectively and actively in the community.

After I moved my sandbox content to the article page, collaboration played a significant role in it. Firstly, it can help refine the content and improve the quality of articles, like the peer review we did in the class assignment. Secondly, it also help regulate the community and build connection between community members, which in turn enhance their engagement and commitment in the community, thus leads to higher retention. For instance, teahouse is a great place for new editors to get to know Wikipedia’s editing rules. We can interact with the hosts and learn about their editing experiences. Meanwhile, those ‘hosts’ who act as mentors will also get a sense of achievement. Furthermore, every article stands for an interest. When editing an article with other editors together, it’s easy to find one who shares similar interests with us and thus make us more committed to this community, during which a shift may happen from identity-based to bonds-based commitment.

What are my recommendations and rationales?
Based on the course materials, my recommendations will involve some key community elements like motivation, contribution and commitment, in keeping newcomers and engaging with current editors.

To create motivation and increase contributions, Wikipedia can help match the new editors with the topics that they are actually or potentially interested in. To do this, it is important to first figure out why a user will sign up for Wikipedia to be an editor rather than simply looking for information on it. The first user type is people who sign up with no specific intention. When they first log in, we can make a brief introduction of how Wikipedia works and ask them to select their interested article topics. According to their interests, we can randomly arrange some related requested articles or stub ones for the new editors to start with. For the second user type who sign up with a more specific intention, it could be a sudden decision when they find something wrong or needs to be added in their interested article. To keep them and encourage their further contribution, we can also randomly arrange articles that are related to the one they first involve in. As stated in the design claim in BSOC ‘Compared to asking people at random, asking people to perform tasks that interest them and that they are able to perform increases contributions’, it would be helpful to serve as a good start in both ensuring retention and making contributions, especially for the second type of users who just want to have a one-time edit and may never come back again.

To enhance commitment, some collaborative activities can be introduced in communities such as ‘real-time collaborations’ with Wikipedia experienced editors. The collaboration aims to use experienced editors as a way to cluster the community, so that the community members have chances to edit articles with Wikipedia’s most experienced editors. In the collaboration, the members can either join in the editings or just watch how they edit, which is also a great way for members to satisfy their curiosities and learn how to edit articles in a more effective and correct way. In order to increase the diversity of Wikipedia articles, the topics of articles in the activities can be from requested articles or list of stubs that normally are less popular and attract less attention,. The real-time collaboration would work like Google Docs and members can also create chat in it. Every time, we can open several ‘rooms’ with different themes for real-time collaborations, thus members who are interested in certain themes can enter the same room, which increase the possibility for them to build better connections. To ensure the real-time collaboration will not end up in a mess, a set of norms and regulations can also be discussed and made in advance.