User:Zwdy/Report

For the Wikipedia assignment, I contributed to the article l’Ambroisie, which is a famous Michelin three-star French restaurant in Paris. I will assess my experience with Wikipedia in this report in a chronological order, and give my recommendation accordingly.

The first stage of contributing to Wikipedia is to find and select an article. I went through the topic list, the stub list, and academic disciplines category list, and eventually found the article on the stub list. There are two sides of this time-consuming process. The advantage is that I am likely to build intrinsic motivation because I am improving an article that’s interesting to me and I find it worth the time to polish it. The disadvantage is that the cost of time and effort involved is too high. Economically speaking, when the cost is too high and outweigh the benefit, people will be reluctant to contribute. After spending several hours looking for the article, my initial motivation of contribution was significantly decreased.

Based on my experience, I think Wikipedia can do several things to encourage people to make initial contribution and reduce the cost of doing it. First of all, Wikipedia should make the need more clear. Before I am introduced with various topic lists, I thought people edit Wikipedia as they encounter them. Therefore, Wikipedia can publicize their need and stress the benefit to the community. For example, since Wikipedia has a huge flow of visitors every day, they can put a link direct to the lists of topics on the side of Wikipedia pages and tell readers that those are the articles they can help improve. If the need of request is clear and simple, there will be more potential contributors. Secondly, Wikipedia can reach out to specific people with appropriate tasks. For instance, after people register for Wikipedia, Wikipedia can ask them to fill out a survey, including which topics they are interested in and which fields they know. Then the data should help Wikipedia to generate lists of users they can reach out for specific topics.

The second stage of my contribution is to evaluate the original article and see if there is any obvious flaws. I wrote a general assessment for the article, pointing out things need to improved, such as the writing style, dated references, informal structure, and incomplete information. Although it was helpful to evaluate the article before making any changes, my motivation decreased a lot during this process and my cost of contribution increased.

It is worth mentioning about the training modules. The training module was the biggest challenge to my passion of improving the article about a restaurant I like so much. The modules are tedious and make the process very complicated. I admit that the training modules are very comprehensive, which is good for newcomers. However, since our course is linked with Wiki Edu, which is designed for academic institutions. I think some of the training modules are unnecessary. Also, speaking of Wiki Edu, I found it’s poorly designed. Not only the user interface is not as attractive as it intends to be, but also the activity list is confusing. I eventually got a sense of how Wiki Edu works after three weeks of using it. Therefore, my recommendation for Wikipedia is to improve the design of the website. I think Wikipedia article pages are designed well, which make them obvious and easy for people to read. If Wiki Edu can have the same kind of design, it will increase people’s interest to learn about the community.

Then it comes to the actual contribution. It’s kind a commitment to the community but it’s not at the same time. My intention of participating in Wikipedia community is that it’s a task I have to complete for my class, and I chose to improve the article that’s important to me. In some part, it’s an identity-based commitment for me, but the deadline and the obligation to do so makes my commitment very weak. Honestly, the training module plays minor role during my participation in the community. When I draft my article in the sandbox, I didn’t rely on the training module, but on the instructor who walked through the process in class. It’s more helpful to see the demonstration than read all the instructions. Because the training module contain too much information and texts, I skimmed through it. However, with the demonstration in class, I followed each step and felt more informed. The training modules did help a little when I was confused by something, and I looked for the specific things that was helpful at that moment. Therefore, Wikipedia can make some training modules as references or Q&A style toolkit for people to utilize when they encounter problems. It will be helpful if there are video demonstrations to walk people through the first several stages, which should be more involving than making people read texts. Besides, Wikipedia can make the commitment more normative. It’s clear that everyone has used Wikipedia at some point of their life, no matter it’s for academic purposes or daily life questions. Therefore, Wikipedia can express this kind of direct reciprocity, showing people what they have received and how they can give back to the community.

Overall, the experience with Wikipedia really gave me an insight into online communities. I realized that online communities are dynamic and complex. Thanks to a lot of participants, the community changes every day and at every moment. Wikipedia is a collection of knowledge, and it’s fascinating to see how those knowledge are gathered by tens of thousands of people. The second thing I learned is that every potential contributor may be a bystander or free-rider. It’s hard for a huge community like Wikipedia to involve people because people have the thought of  “even I am not contributing, others will.” However, as I mentioned in the recommendations, it’s worth trying to make the first contribution easier, make the cost of contribution lower, make the need clearer and targeted, make the commitment more need- and normative-based, and improve the design of the learning environment.