User:Jaludvigsen9/analysis

My experience through writing a Wikipedia article has been interesting and exciting. I was happy to be able to join such a smart well organized community as Wikipedia. The most interesting information I feel we learned in class was in regards to the Wikipedia Norms. These norms are created by the community themselves. "Displaying feedback of members to others increases members' knowledge of community norms and complance with them; formal feedback is more effective than informal feedback" (Kraut, p146). Wikipedia constantly has administrators tracking and updating articles. Their norms focus more on an institutional level mostly in regards to membership policy as well community mechanisms . The site faced some challenges in the beginning and got a reputation for not being a proper resource due to the public being able to create changes. It seems as if Wikipedia was lost in the sense of which direction it needed to go in. The online community need to pick if it was going to be a "prosocial community" and how they wanted their users to communicate. I felt they made a great choice in having talk pages; this was a resource way to communicate and ask questions that needed to be answered. Being and online community text can be taken out of context or people can disagree on a topic. Having the talk page allows people to explain themselves as well back up their information. As Kraut mentioned, "offering multiple spaces in a single online community offers several advantages" (Kraut, p. 237). This feature had a great advantage for many of my classmates in having the ability to reach out on articles that were alike and allowed the community to interact with them on their written topic. In my experience, I didn't receive any communication from other users besides my classmates. My article had never been touched and there really wasn't much on topics that surrounded it. Although, I wish I got this experience I did have the opportunity to edit other peoples pages; like I did in this one: Edits . Although my edits were small it felt really good to contribute to Wikipedia and to make it a better academia site. Currently, my article, Fontanel Mansion , still hasn't been approved but I don't mind that it got denied the first time. The reason I don't mind this is because it proves that this online community as a whole has adapted into a very strong resourceful and educated community. Wikipedia has high standards and expectations for their users and articles, as we learned in class. As a newcomer in the Wikipedia community, I felt welcomed. I say this because when I wrote my article and it didn't get published I had an administrator kindly explain to me why it got denied. Kraut explains in design claim 23, that "when old-timers provide newcomers formal mentorship, the newcomers become more committed to the community, learn how to behave in it, and contribute more"(Kraut, p.217). I felt that because he was taking me under his wing and actually explained to me why my post got denied from being published I was being molded to the Wikipedia rules and standards. Although the mentorship was informal I still valued the input from the administrator user. I am throughly impressed with how this large community is able to control millions of articles. Although there are some trolls, like on any online community, Wikipedia does a good job regulated them by having violation of content rules. That way there, Wikipedia can take something down if it violates content is a great rule to have for a community. It prevents harsh reddit that can be accompanied by online trolls. However, Wikipedia still has the ability to have off-topic conversations on users talk pages. This allows community members to bond creating a bond-based commitment and identity- based commitment (Kraut, p101). In conclusion, I thought that being able to be a part of Wikipedia was a great experience. I enjoyed being part of an online community that embraces academia as well uses peoples expertise to their advantage. This commitment members have has created a resources for people across the world that can be updated momentarily to help keep up with the world and its history. One thing I found strange though is the Wiki Badges, although it helps provide motivation for Wikipedias, I felt it is a little out of the ordinary for a encyclopedia site. In general, it was a positive experience and gave me a lot more respect for people who do write articles for Wikipedia.

Reference

Kraut, R. E., Resnick, P., & Kiesler, S. (2011). Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.