Prompt

Reflect upon your contributions to Wikipedia in light of what we’ve learned about online community, especially the management of newcomers, moderation, and community governance. Write this on a subpage of your Wikipedia User page—not your Talk page. Although you will be writing in the first person about your experiences, be analytical and engage class concepts. You may structure it thematically or chronologically. Follow the ethical requirements associated with a public report of a public space.

Your Wikipedia contribution will be assessed on the basis of Wikipedia’s perfect article criteria, your reflection will be assessed via my writing rubric. Additionally, your reflection should make use of Wikipedia features such as Wikipedia citations and links to article versions and specific contributions (or “diffs.”); see my user page Link section for a demo. Instead of a paper copy and TurnItIn, email me a link to your reflection—and among its links there must be a link to your article. For the debrief, we will discuss rather than have presentations.

Reflection

Online communities have been a central part of my life since I was very young. I played games and updated my scrapbook on barbie.com from the age of 6, and moved on to Neopets, the chat rooms of Age of Mythology, a lively custom server on Ragnarok Online, and eventually, a position as social media manager at a startup. I am admittedly entrenched in my many networks on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and elsewhere for the profit of my company as well as my personal brand. I am a regular member of Reddit, Tumblr, a couple of MMORPGs, and a number of other interest-based sub-communities. Outside of the personal content of my social networks, however, I am not a content producer, preferring instead to repost, reblog, and lurk. My audience is limited to people I know in person and those who wander in after a fortuitous encounter with one of my rare posts. Having to create work for network-wide exposure was a novel experience for me, and my long-established web habits guided my behavior on Wikipedia at every step of the process.

My first surprise came in seeing Wikipedia as a community at all. As long as I have been using Wikipedia to guide research for school papers or get background knowledge on a subject of conversation, I had absolutely no awareness of the people behind it, assuming that most of the content had come from members of some research institution or library association. I did not know that a Talk page existed, nor did I understand the purpose of revision history, because I also assumed that the content was largely static. After all, I rarely visited the same page more than once, and would not have had the attention span to register differences anyway. My first step in the acculturation process was determining which parts of Wikipedia could be likened to my other web communities.

Curating a highly individualistic profile page has always been my favorite part of community engagement (character customization is usually the first thing I look for when choosing a video game to buy). I learned HTML when I was only eight years old because I wanted a beautifully designed profile and guild page on Neopets, and Wikipedia's user page offered a similar space for freeform self-expression and experimentation. It was my first destination to learn the syntax of editing. Wikipedia does not have a normative style for their user pages, nor did I know what topics I would be most inclined to contribute to, so I ended up with an eclectic set of trivial facts in a table with a header slapped on.

The membership of Wikipedia was remarkably familiar to me, closely resembling the "geek" communities I had been a part of before social networks became popular. I had already internalized the obligation to know, and preferred to teach myself everything I needed before taking even the smallest step into engagement. I thus spent several days poring through the talk pages of articles related to mine, entrenched as it was in some of the organizational mechanisms of Wikipedia. Interactive storytelling is a part of the WikiProject on Video Games, and their standards are distinct from those of the wider Wiki community, but they provided the topic-specific steps to engage that I needed to move forward quickly.

It is worth noting that everything I did on Wikipedia was inevitably framed as an assignment for class before it was a community engagement. I had to consider how my public history on the site would affect my grade in addition to my standing with Wikipedians. I also tended to ignore things I might have engaged with had I the intrinsic motivation to engage. For instance, many of the design claims of Kraut are exhibited in the Video Games WikiProject, and I am highly interested in the field, as I was once studying to become a game designer. Still, I never looked into the other articles of low-class to see if I had knowledge of any, and I never delved into the Wikipedians' perspective on the gaming controversies that I've followed elsewhere. It mostly served as a jumping point for me to lurk in the norm-establishing subcommunity pages.

I began editing my user page again while idly browsing the Wikipedia subculture pages. I became deeply interested in the concept of WikiFauna, which are some of the more humorous and non-encyclopedic aspects of the Wiki meta-community. Determining which WikiFauna I most closely resembled was akin, to me, to choosing a race or class in a game - I searched through the animals and mythological creatures to find some kind of Wiki-based identity I could assume to inspire and guide my contribution style. By choosing WikiKitten, I was hoping to convey to any Wikipedians that encounter my edits that I am new, and doing my best to participate in good form. I was also happy to take the descriptive tasks of the role: small fixes, independent work style, and occasional outreach for assistance and recognition.

In line with the design claims about mentorship from older members, and because it was an assignment, I reached out to User:Fences_and_windows because they had posted on the interactive storytelling talk page a couple of years before, when discussion was still active. They responded within a day, and although their suggestions leaned more towards the art subcommunities, the notes about the interactive art umbrella and the reminder to write about only one concept were quite helpful. Their tone was authoritative but friendly, and opened with a thank-you for writing. I was excited to continue working afterwards. My next step was to familiarize myself with the page itself, and its content. My first edit was to convert the citation style into the one I would be using, and to make minor edits and cleanups. I also replaced the opening paragraph to remove, from the start, what I saw as an unnecessarily pessimistic stance on the topic, and to introduce it with more accessible language.

I was surprised, above all, that the pre-existing article I chose to work on attracted less attention than those that were created for the assignment. The interactive storytelling page documents a few of the concerns of the Wikipedians that worked on it, and my connections in the games industry have a lot to say on the inter-industry war over the topic. Yet over the course of my editing the article, only a few other entities were present, including User:AnomieBOT, User:Yobot, User:McGeddon, User:The1337gamer, and User:Ground_Zero. The edits from these people were all minor - the two bots corrected citations and minor formatting errors, McGeddon reverted an admittedly unsubstantiated "Interactive drama" namespace move, and later replaced the rest of the mentions of ID with "interactive storytelling". The1337Gamer fixed a citation shortly after the only edit with an interesting social aspect.

The administrator Ground Zero removed the phrase (but not limited to) from a sentence, with the comment "'Including' does not imply any limitation - redundant writing is boring. Don't be boring." This user was the second person I interacted with directly on their talk page, and much to my delight, they were equally responsive. Not only was I thrilled to have attracted the attention of a "fabled" administrator, they affirmed my reaction to the edit as exemplary of good faith behavior compared to other users that were insulted. It is worth noting that our class's attention to the good faith norm was what kept me from taking the comment personally, as I definitely would have done otherwise.

I flagged the article for reassessment on November 19th. After elaborating on the subject extensively, I believe(d) that the lack of contest over my edits and the positive social interactions with two experienced users indicated a step forward in the quality of the article. As I did throughout the project, I checked my notifications and the history pages regularly, anticipating a message in a bottle from the hidden human side of Wikipedia. The page has not yet been reassessed by anybody, nor received any edits or extra attention as a result of the flag. While I do hope to receive a good grade on the Wikipedia assignment, I am much more invested in a good review from the community, which will have much greater longevity and relevance to others in my life. My real-life community's interest in Wikipedia will eventually be a much more important motivator for my continued engagement.

The most significant thing I learned from this experience was that an online community can be very similar to any other if the user wishes it to be. The aspects of Wikipedia that drove me to engage were the same ones that appeal to me in Tumblr, Reddit, or Facebook. Offering some kind of personal expression and social chat-spaces is unavoidable, no matter how technical the purpose of the community - they are necessary for it to succeed. I found an outlet for my tendencies towards fun and chatter, and plenty of resources for self-education and exploration, to fuel my desire to contribute. But whether these outlets will be as appealing when my GPA and self-worth is not involved is anybody's guess.