User:Sophiegeary/Report

I’ve spent the last six weeks learning about Wikipedia through WikiEdu and creating my first ever contribution to this community, editing the Seattle Aquarium page. This new skill set, along with the concepts that our course in Online Communities has introduced, has enabled me to make informed suggestions and advice to Wikipedia from my first hand experience.  

My education thus far within WikiEdu and throughout our course has allowed me to better understand the many ways in which Wikipedia is a thriving and well organized community. To begin, the process of WikiEdu provides a comprehensive and detailed introduction explaining how to create or edit a community. WikiEdu’s step by step tutorials helped me with the more technical processes such as adding photos to WikiMedia commons. Wikipedia also has a clear and productive list of norms that regulate good behavior without being too restrictive and repelling individuals from joining (and staying) in the community. Wikipedia’s norms, such as prioritizing notability and neutrality and assuming good faith, help to regulate behaviors and assist new members in contributing effectively right off the bat. Wikipedia’s detailed process and regulations when contributing to an article can be difficult to navigate at first, as I found. Many of the norms and processes are niche - such as signing messages with four tildes - and are learned with time, but they are in place to create order and keep the site running effectively. WikiEdu helped with this, and ensured that I was provided all the information possible to help me succeed.

However meticulous this community is, I do believe there are ways in which Wikipedia could improve. Wikipedia suffers from the “free rider problem” where a majority of users don't pay for services or participate, they only benefit from the knowledge. To focus more attention on motivation techniques is key to expanding the community of users who are active participants. In chapter 3 of BSOC, Robert E. Kraut and others define ways to motivate users to increase participation in a community. One way that would be applicable to encourage more participation in Wikipedia would be to highlight useful contributions that new users could partake in. This could look like experienced users listing easy tasks a new user can begin with. Additionally, it is important to increase new Wikipedia users in general, and draw in these newcomers. Chapter 5 of BSOC talked about active recruitment, which I believe is lacking within Wikipedia. Interpersonal recruitment, such as the utilization of existing social networks, could help with outreach and gaining new contributors. Highlighting the option to edit an article, if a user views one that is poorly written, could open free riding users to the possibility of editing and assisting others down the line. Active recruitment techniques such as this could get more people involved, and although there is always concern for attracting the right kind of people, expanding the pool of contributors to Wikipedia would be beneficial to this community's survival and growth. Once users begin to contribute to Wikipedia, many establish normative commitment, or feelings of obligation to a community such as a commitment to the cause. The benefits that Wikipedia provides the mass public are recognized and many consistent contributors feel that they are contributing to a greater good, paying it forward through generalized reciprocity. After finishing my initial contribution to Wikipedia, I feel more gratified and excited than I expected - the notion of contributing to the knowledge of others makes me want to continue to participate.

The most useful topics that we covered as a course were motivation and newcomers. The lectures and readings associated with these topics in particular correlated well with our Wikipedia progress and offered very valuable insights into the importance of our course and projects. In my opinion, the least applicable concept we covered was the ones regarding anonymity. I felt that this discussion did not give me information that was helpful regarding the main communities we have been focusing on, and did not add anything to my Wikipedia project experience. Studying Wikipedia and working on my article enabled me to interact with the topics that we discussed and learned about in a useful way. My project facilitated this learning while being a meaningful contribution, which was rewarding and well thought out.

My suggestions and advice should be taken into consideration because I represent the population that had never contributed to Wikipedia or felt a draw to the community as anything more than a viewer of articles, until I was introduced to this course. I am a prime example of someone who would not participate unless I am getting something out of it or am introduced to it through outside sources. After my progress and going live with my article on the aquarium, I understand the importance of contributing to this community in order to preserve it. My main advice falls around more outreach to incentivise Wikipedia readers to become Wikipedia contributors. Based on my experience these past six weeks, if more people were encouraged to edit one article, and guided closely (through WikiEdu for example) along the way, the number of successful contributions would skyrocket.