User:LatakiaHill/Reflection

With an ambitious vision, a long history, and a dedicated community of contributors, Wikipedia can be daunting for newcomers. After writing an article and making numerous edits across on Wikipedia, I can now reflect on how Wikipedia is able to integrate newcomers into such a large and complicated project. I argue that formal procedures that clearly show how newcomers can contribute to Wikipedia based on their intrinsic motivations would increase the retention of newcomers. If newcomers feel that they must wade through an overwhelming bureaucracy to make substantial contributions to Wikipedia, then any motivation to participate will quickly wilt away.

While I first thought it was cheesy, the significance of the Wikipedia guideline "Be Bold" became clear to me as soon as I moved my article to mainspace. While I had finished drafting the article for more than a week, I was worried about actually posting it. What if it was immediately reverted? What if some 20-year editor flew into the talk page and listed all the errors and mistake I had made? My worries were unfounded; with the amount of articles that are created and edited on Wikipedia every minute, nobody batted an eye. Part of "being bold," I realized, was to recognize that I didn't need someone to constantly hold my hand on Wikipedia, and that I was free to make changes as I saw fit. If people had issues with them, they could always be discussed later.

With this in mind, I started making edits to other pages whenever I happened to come across something during my free time. Some were just minor edits and the fixing of dead links, but the first nerve-wracking change I made that required a subjective judgement was deleting an entire subsection that I thought was promotional. Instead of facing backlash or being ignored like I expected, I was surprised when a few hours later I received a notification of thanks from another editor, and a message on the talk page agreeing with my decision. This small act of kindness not only encouraged me to continue making small edits, but to also start thinking about looking into bigger contributions; I was interested in the decision-making processes that Wikipedians used, especially when it came to thorny questions of bias and representation. Like the Wikipedian that talked to the class, Jake Orlowitz, I was fascinated by Wikipedia as a continuation of the Enlightenment ideal of the Encyclopédie, and the ways to possibly improve not just Wikipedia's "collection of facts," but also its "way of knowing". Kraut & Resnick (p. 42) argue that intrinsic motivation is a prime driver long-term participation within a community, and I found myself immensely satisfied with the idea of contributing to Wikipedia.

Of course, the more complicated the change, the more difficult and demanding it is to do so. One image that I first noticed on the Trans-Saharan slave trade in particular drew my interest because it cited no author yet was used widely across Wikipedia (and on sites across the rest of the internet, which all sourced back to Wikipedia). This poorly sourced image, to me, was indicative of larger issue of using 19th century engravings that portrayed Arabs as exaggeratedly cruel without ever explicitly warning against the bias they could have. However, I was at a loss as to how to raise this concern. On the talk page of this one page, while these images were used across the site? On a relevant Wikiproject? Thinking to Ksenia Coffman's case, how many edits and arguments, despite my intrinsic motivation, would I be be willing to potentially wade into over a concern about Orientalism? The bureaucracy and history of Wikipedia could be best seen in the uploader of the image I objected to: While the user was banned 14 years ago for creating 700 (!) sockpuppet accounts to write articles solely dedicated to criticizing Islam, the images he added live on, and I had no idea how to propose a large change that wouldn't draw debate and be a giant time sink.

Asking for feedback for my main article was a different kind of bureaucracy. After moving the article to mainspace, I first asked for feedback from the Teahouse, as I had received an automated invite there. I had expected suggestions to my writing, the structuring of the article, and explicitly asked for recommendations on where else to ask for feedback. While I received was having two of the article's sources removed for being from Fox News, despite only using them for quoting someone being interviewed. Still told not to use them after explaining my reasoning, I realized I could just do what the page for Maj Toure did and cited a news source deemed reliable that shared the clip from Fox News, satisfying the reliable source bot's check.

While I would go to the Teahouse again to ask about other issues, I didn't reach out to ask for feedback on my main article again, partially because I didn't know where else to go (my question about that on the Teahouse went unanswered) and partially because the related Wikiprojects seemed completely dead and didn't have a history of giving feedback either. The downside of what allowed me to "be bold" previously showed itself: In the grand scheme of Wikipedia, there wasn't much reason for someone else to make substantial edits or suggestions to an unoffensive and standard article. My article would mainly be tweaked with minor edits, including from bots. Elsewhere, mistakes in my editing were also corrected by bots. While I was impressed by Wikipedia's network of various bots that performed so many different tasks (and addressed Kraut & Resnick's (p. 180) concern of "protection from newcomers"), I couldn't help but also feel like I was missing tangible engagement and discussion with other Wikipedians.

While Kraut & Resnick's (p. 208) design principles also speak to the need for newcomers to be welcomed and receive positive encouragement, a larger concern for me was a lack of direction and a clear way to resolve that confusion by asking other Wikipedians. While I asked for feedback and received it, I did not get any answers regarding my questions of "advice on structuring the article" and "where else I could look for feedback." Both questions concerned not just immediate issues I was looking for in the article, but also knowledge of how to engage with Wikipedia more effectively. Instead, to improve my article, I resorted to slowly reading through pages of Wikipedia pages on writing style, templates, infoboxes, categories, and more, shifting through which pages were relevant and which were not.

When discussing how to teach newcomers, Kraut & Resnick (p. 215) claim that "by using formal, sequential, and collective socialization tactics, new members are likely to become more committed to the community, learn how to behave in it, and contribute more." This is a process that Wikipedia notably lacks. While Wikipedia has an optional tutorial and a community portal that links to articles in need of minor editing, there is not much formal assistance to more tricky aspects of Wikipedia, such as when to announce edits on talk pages, what an RfD is, etc. Wikipedia's tutorials only teach newcomers how to edit pages, and not how to engage with the community. This job is instead taken up by literally hundreds of pages that newcomers must parse through if they wish to engage with Wikipedia's community and vision beyond gnoming. This becomes a problem for retention when a major intrinsic motivation for many potential newcomers is diffused and entangled in an increasingly complex and bureaucratic documentation (WP:BE BOLD, but also WP:CAREFUL; WP:There is no deadline, but remember, WP:The deadline is now!).

The right intrinsic motivation might be hard to come by, but it is also hard to extinguish. Ultimately, the charm of Wikipedia outweighed its faults to me. I think I'll continue to make small edits such as fixing link-rot and updating articles with recent information for a long time to come. I had just as much fun and learned just as much about Wikipedia from making these kinds of edits as writing my main article. I am especially fascinated with the how the way knowledge should be represented on Wikipedia is discussed, and hope to learn more as I continue to contribute. However, despite my great interest in contributing to Wikipedia, I think unless I have a good amount of time and energy to spare (and way more experience), it won't be a while until I throw my two cents into an RfC or start my own. At its best, Wikipedia is like a jungle, a dense habitat full of enchanting flora and fauna just waiting to be explored, an unknown territory where you can carve out your own little niche. At its worst, Wikipedia is a bureaucratic fever-dream, where you wander through long, empty hallways lined with dusty cabinets of paperwork, with only a passing bot to keep you company.