User:Rheab16/analysis

I wrote my Wikipedia article about a beauty YouTuber, KathleenLights, or Kathleen Fuentes. She is a popular YouTube star with over three million subscribers who posts videos of makeup tutorials, Q&As and reviews of make-up products. This analysis page will hypothesize and summarize my interactions with the community and analyze their behaviors, moderation and governance in connection with class readings. I started my writing in my sandbox page towards the end of January and moved into main space later next month. Initially, I wrote that my experience as a newcomer was fairly simple and other than one hiccup, I did not have a lot of backlash from the community. However, more problems came soon after the first one was solved. I think the Wikipedia community emphasizes the exchange of legitimate information and tries to keep all articles as objective as possible to the extent that their policies regarding newcomers are overlooked. Through my experiences, amongst other things, I learned that articles that include mostly primary research are not considered to be in keeping of Wikipedia rules.

 During my first week of having this article in my main space, it was deleted. It was not just flagged for deletion; it was directly deleted (speedy delete) as soon as a member of the Wikipedian community saw promotional subject matter. The page was deleted (Special:Diff/766165467) at first, but my professor was able to have it moved to drafts and I was eventually able to edit there before attempting to move it to main space again. I was shocked by this because I thought the users would be nicer. I think the welcoming of newcomers is not handled as well as they think it is, and it is certainly not the friendliest community in that regard. The information in question was the sole focus for them so far, not the fact that I was a newcomer and I had little to no experience as a member. Because of this particular experience, I understood that I was part of a community that valued encyclopedic data more than members of the community. I did not feel welcome and was immediately intimidated by the resistance which made me slightly afraid of rewriting my article. Based on earlier research, I knew that Wikipedia had a “Please do not bite the newcomers” policy, which allowed me to think that my article had a little more time before it was deleted. I had intentions to improve it and add more sources because I assumed I would be able to edit later. It is definitely hard to fight the ‘promotional’ claim against my article, because I would agree that it was not entirely objective at the time.

Building Successful Online Communities by Kraut and Resnick lists five basic problems when dealing with newcomers in perspective of both, the existing members and the newcomers. These include recruitment, selection, retention, socialization and protection. I was not recruited to be a member of this online community, I did not see advertisements that made me want to join it. I joined the community for a class and I wanted to do well on Wikipedia for that reason. There was no selection process when it came to joining the community; if anyone can join the community then it is likely that trolls will emerge eventually and underqualified people like myself would be able to edit the encyclopedia. Since I was not editing pages incorrectly or contributing false information online, I was a potentially valuable member who had the ability to learn and grow as a contributor. The only retention tactics used on me were politeness, I was kindly and honestly told why my initial article was not good. I appreciated that but it did not make me want to stay in the community, as mentioned earlier, it scared me. I was socialized into Wikipedia by my professor but even the community tried to socialize me by providing helpful links every time an issue came up with my article. Wikipedians are protective of their community, which is something I admire, because they certainly tried to protect the integrity of the website by deleting my article the first time.

My article was taken down for the second time in April as seen here: Special:Diff/774167029. After the first time, I edited the article as a draft, added more sources, deleted some of my old ones and changed the tone to more objective (Special:Permalink/773177395). This solved the promotional part of the problem but aroused the problem of notability. This meant that members of the community thought that Kathleen Fuentes was not someone who warranted a whole article about herself on Wikipedia. I disagreed and defended my topic, explaining why she is a notable person. This exchange can be viewed on Wikipedia: Articles for deletion/KathleenLights. My argument is that there are other YouTubers, very similar to Fuentes, who have Wikipedia articles about them. I also try to explain that this is a topic that is hard to source without primary sources but that does not automatically translate to an unnotable person. I felt that in my case, the moderation was done too strictly. I am using James Grimmelmann’s definition of moderation: “the governance mechanisms that structure participation in a community to facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse.” This particular moderation was not facilitating cooperation, in fact it felt an exclusion from it because I have seen so many similar articles, with similar sources that have not been flagged for that reason. I used the example of Jaclyn Hill in my response to the deletion flag on the discussion page. “A community’s moderators can promote posts or hide them, honor posters or shame them, recruit users or ban them. Their decisions influence what is seen, what is valued, what is said.” This particular moderator decided to attack my article, despite the presence of similar articles and shamed me by not only flagging for deletion, but using crude language. My subtle way of responding to (what I perceived as) the meanness was to send this editor a Barnstar thanking him for his criticisms of my article.

I think that there are other ways to go about the moderation, although I think that alternatives are probably time consuming and not something moderators can do for all newcomers. Deleting means removing content entirely, but a moderator can also edit the page, which is the alteration of said content. This approach would not only benefit me as a new user, it would encourage me to work harder and in the right direction as well. Kraut & Resnick’s design claim 17 talks about entry barriers for newcomers increasing commitment, but since I did not have entry barriers while entering the community, my commitment was not well reflected on my work. Once I started being actively involved by writing my own article, I experienced barriers that have now increased my commitment to the article but not to community as a whole as seen by my defensive attitude. Since my interactions as a newcomer were not pleasant, I am not likely to stay in this community to contribute more, consistent to design claim 18.

My hypothesis is proven through my discouraging experiences; the information was more important to the community than my presence. The help I was provided when I was flagged for deletion did not include editing, it included an opinion about how unimportant by subject was and it seemed rude to me. I do not necessarily think that this is a bad thing - if members of the community are trying to protect and respect it, it is a good thing because even if they hurt someone’s feelings, they are still proving capable of sharing legitimate information. As solely a reader, I would absolutely appreciate the fact that they take their roles as moderators so seriously. I do not want to find false information online and I also do not want promotional information that would sway me. I genuinely appreciate the work Wikipedians do in order to keep the website reliable. If the overall attitude was more helpful than dismissive, I might have had a better experience with Wikipedia.