User:Yiyunl347/report

My Personal Experience
Regarding my personal experience contributing to Wikipedia, the very first challenge is the large number of norm and behavioral standard. It’s very time-consuming since I kept digging into the internal links and they are actually inexhaustible. What's worse, the more I read, the more reluctant I was to start my writing.

With the deadline approaching, I had to “be bold” to move my article. The magic moment is when someone helped me in both formatting and grammar only five minutes after I published it. At that moment, I felt that I was accepted by the community,  and I was astonished at by how proficient those active members are and how quickly my article can be noticed. I started to expect more feedback. Disappointedly, except for reviews from the class, I got no comment since then. And I stopped checking the message box.

This experience has allowed me to take a new look at Wikipedia. Now I have a sense of how this biggest encyclopaedia works, and I become aware of all the collective efforts made by a tremendous number of volunteers behind Wikipedia. Also, I have never visited the talk page or clicked the "edit" button before. Now, I have convinced by the slogan "anyone can edit".

Suggestions
I still will not consider myself as a member of this community rather than as a user of Wikipedia. Actually, Wikipedia has suffered for a long time from "a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers", which directly leads to the decrease in the number of contributions. To help Wikipedia to engage and retain new comers like me, I would like to present some suggestions：

1.Improve the Display of Guidelines and Policies
The tutorial and The Wikipedia Adventure taught me in a relatively engaging and interactive way, but it's more common for new comers to check the Help page and follow up all the lengthy and excessively detailed guidelines,  which can be really intimating for new comers.

Beginner mode: give hints at the point of an action
For a community that do not want to deter its potential contributors, it's wise to make the guidelines not prominent. On the another hand, in order to protect the community and avoid new comers' violation, it's necessary to let new comers be familiar with all the important guidelines. A beginner mode, which gives simultaneous hints for users who has never edited or created any article, could help resolve this dilemma.

Wikipedia can encourage new users to switch to beginner mode, but should not automatically set the mode for them. If the rules were thrown in their face, it will also create a dislike. If the mode is on, the website can give a clear and simple hint at the point where the editors could possibility violate some rules. For example, if the editor is about to a External Links section, a hint should show up telling about the formatting and links that normally need to be avoided.

In this way, the new comer will not be forced to read all the guidelines and only be shown the useful ones.

Display Good Examples for Different Categories of Articles
As the largest encyclopedia in the world, the English Wikipedia alone has over 5,280,227 articles of any length. They are under thousands of categories and projects. If possible, it would be better to give at least a good example in one categories. An important way for people to learn is to observe what other people did and the consequences of their behavior. And good examples can not only display how the guideline works directly and also increases editor's adherence to those expectations.

Moreover, an appropriate example can be used as a template and substantially lessen the workload. Take myself as an example, I copied the whole info box from another similar article. But it's still imperfect and another editor helped me correct it. If every new article can use the correct and perfect info box as template, both the editors and helpers will be relieved.

2.Create a Quantitative Feedback Indicator
Though the mission statement can increase members’ identity-based commitment to the community in general. For individuals that are newly to this community, they will need a more concrete goal to enhance their motivations. And performance feedback can be most motivating because of people’s desire for self-improvement.

Except for verbal feedback from other Wikipedians, a quantitative performance measure generated by computer can create a external reward for new comers. To minimize the side effect of "gaming the system" and reserve the encyclopedia style, a plain and unambitious counter that indicates how many people have read or visited this article is the optimal choice. The counter will make the article page "alive" even if there is nobody co-editting the article, and give the creator/editor a sense of satisfaction. No ranking system or leaderboard involved can make sure the small feature will not generate the atmosphere of competition.

3.Focus on the Newcomers Who Fit the Need and Value
It's true that interactions between newcomers and old-timers is powerful to help retain new members. However, it's almost impossible to assign the huge amount of articles to the limited number of active members.As a matter of fact, even though “Welcoming Committee” is already existing in Wikipedia, the magic moment happened to me did not happen to everyone in class.

Rather than send the greeting templates to every newly-registered members, the higher priority should be to give sincere feedback to those who contributed already or have strong desire to contribute. But how to screen for theConclusion ideal members could be truly challenging.

Note that those suggestions could be defective, because they highly relied on my personal experience, as a newcomer in lack of deep understanding about how the effectively autonomous works.