User:Zjhjeremy/Report

Reflection Essay

Wikipedia serves as a substitute to Baidu Baike (an online encyclopedia owned by Baidu) for me after I started living in America. Despite using Wikipedia in my daily life, I did not know it was a community-based encyclopedia until I took this class. I used to just go to Wikipedia for neutral fact-checking, and I never once stopped for a moment to see where all the information came from and what all those surrounding tabs are for. Since Wikipedia is such a well-known encyclopedia, I took for granted how easy I can get the information I needed. Learning and contributing to Wikipedia myself let me know that it isn’t an easy process to build a page that is informative and well structured. In my opinion, it is a tedious process to contribute to any article in Wikipedia, namely publishing some work live. I can see that this process of contributing to a Wikipedia article could be exciting to some people; for example, seeking online sources about a topic of interest, analyzing those sources for potential takeaways, communicating and sharing potential sources in the talk page with other Wikipedians (who share a similar interest), and drafting in a formal Wikipedia tone. Wikipedians could find a community that lasts long in this way because they share the same goal (to make Wikipedia better), have the same interest (any Wikipedia articles they try to improve), and communicate for a long time (through talk page or user talk page).

Contributing to Wikipedia seemed difficult and complicated to me in the beginning. After learning some functions of Wikipedia through Wikiedu modules, I was able to experiment with the basic user interaction in Wikipedia myself by leaving messages to my classmates on the user talk page. Next, I learned to make drafts and embed references on my user page without directly interfering with the article. It was a difficult task from the beginning to the end, but the lessons I learned are valuable. In my experience, most articles I searched for are rated B or higher, and I quickly ran out of ideas. I looked through the stub-class list and realized many of those are topics I am not familiar with. Still, I managed to find an article about an app game to work on based on my childhood memory.

As the lecture mentions, the number of active contributors has been declining since 2007. After experiencing Wikipedia myself, I see that searching for a topic to write about already poses a problem for prospective Wikipedians who would like to become a part of the community. Although I like that Wikipedia exists as a form of an online community, I feel that the bar to entry will become higher and higher due to the limited interesting articles that exist because many topics aren’t “available” (people could still potentially add more content to an A-class article but will take a lot of time and effort) for new users to join. Despite we, human being, are constantly producing new ideas and great things, I expect those interesting and popular topics to be taken very quickly, therefore, boring and academic heavy topics stay at stub rating since people don’t have the passion to commit to building an article that requires great effort while possibly no one else will be joining. Wikipedia is quite a unique online community for my generation because of how we communicate on this platform. Every action we take in Wikipedia is considered a publishment. When we leave a message on another user’s talk page or save a draft on our user page, we hit “publish.” And it makes sense because once we hit “publish,” everyone on the internet can see it.

When deciding whether to attract more newcomers or socialize the existing Wikipedians, I believe Wikipedia should consider taking the first approach since Wikipedia is so well-known that it already has a stream of viewers every day, thus attracting viewers to their community and converting them into contributors is the key. Wikipedia is a lot more complicated to navigate compared with other online platforms like Reddit or Yahoo!, but introductory modules were extremely helpful for me to learn quickly. Therefore, I suggest similar modules be formally implemented in Wikipedia for increased exposure so that people who regularly use Wikipedia might try these modules and consider becoming Wikipedian themselves. I can also see that Wikipedia already has many extrinsic motivations integrated into the platform like providing users the freedom to create a non-existing article and giving users recognition. However, I have to say that becoming a Wikipedian isn’t for anyone. Wikipedia, in my opinion, is an online community that emphasizes autonomy, meaning that an individual needs some intrinsic motivation to be the “right” people. For example, the sense of progress when following and improving an article, or the sense of accomplishment when publishing an article.