User:Tylercpetersen

Introduction

I am Tyler "the Time Traveler" in Professor Reagle's Online Communities Fall 2014 course.

Online Communities Wikipedia Reflection

Wikipedia’s online community is successful largely in spite of itself. While the product itself is an incredible resource for the public, the community behind the scenes carries on without many of the web's modern enhancements. As will be shown throughout an analysis of my experiences with Wikipedia’s online community, it is clear that Wikipedia makes little effort to entice new users, promote its site, or retain existing users. In effect, Wikipedia’s mission alone creates a sustainable users base. After spending three months embedded in the Wikipedia community through Northeastern University’s Online Communities capstone course working on the Borkum Island war crimes trial page, I do not believe Wikipedia employs best practices for growing and maintaining an online community, as outlined by Robert Kraut and Paul Resnick in their work, Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence Based Social Design. This failure extends to multiple aspects of Wikipedia’s online culture. Including, but not limited to, recruiting new users, retaining existing users, the employment of gratitude across the site, and general usability — all of which I had first experience with as a new user.

In thinking about my journey through the digital halls of Wikipedia, I was struck by the immense challenge that Wikipedia faces in acquiring (and retaining) new members. As Kraut and Resnick succinctly state, “in the face of turnover in their membership, online communities will inevitably die without a constant supply of newcomers.” As a community, Wikipedians have begun to come to terms with this daunting notion as new members are driven off by a steep learning curve and a lack of accessible content to address. Even for me, as a student of Online Communities — a course centered around learning Wikipedia’s nuances — I found the process of joining Wikipedia to be daunting.

Before diving into the onboarding experience for new members, it’s critical to understand Wikipedia’s efforts to recruit new members. After participating in the site, it is clear that recruitment is one of Wikipedia’s weakest aspects. As asserted by Kraut and Resnick, sites must engage in a variety of recruiting methods to generate a pool of prospective members. These methods of recruitment include laissez-faire approaches, word-of-mouth, conventional advertising, and social networking. In my experience, Wikipedia was largely unsuccessful in these categories.

From my experience, Wikipedia appears to employ almost none of these methods of recruitment beyond laissez-faire styles. Laissez-faire styles of recruitment are not designed to actively “pull” members to a site. Instead, this style of recruitment anticipates new users to “seek out or stumble upon a community.” However, it is important to note, this is the least successful style of recruitment.

Beyond laissez-faire, Wikipedia utilizes some word-of-mouth styles of recruitment. In my experience as a student, this was the most evident method present. While participation in Wikipedia was a requirement of the course, Professor Joseph Reagle’s organic enthusiasm for the site was infectious and was its own form of word-of-mouth recruitment. As a prospective user, he sold the idealism and potential of Wikipedia in a way that made me curious about joining the site, regardless of any academic requirements.

When examining the efforts that Wikipedia itself employs (beyond relying on its users to recruit new users), their efforts are ineffective at best. While Kraut and Resnick insist word-of-mouth recruitment styles are some of the most effective methods, they also suggest “impersonal advertising also works.” Sadly, beyond Wikipedia’s own donation campaigns featuring the infamous Jimmy Wales stare, there appears to be little in the way of external advertising to bring in new content creators and editors. As a user of the site, it would appear that this is the result of their non-profit status and the site’s culture. As a new user, my experience has shown that Wikipedians prefer to keep their community fairly insulated from outsiders. As a result, I worry about the longterm health of such an isolated community that seemingly rejects conventional efforts to bring in “new blood.”

A fourth style of recruitment is to enable users to share the community and their experiences through social networking. This style of social media recruitment “increases the number of new members more than impersonal methods.” In my experience, I did not see any easy avenues to involve my social graph in what I had produced in Wikipedia. Furthermore, any sort of modern web design with embedded social elements seems to be eschewed by Wikipedia’s old school community.

Inspite of the poor implementation of recruitment methods, Wikipedia does maintain a fairly robust community of editors. However, as a new user, an interesting notion crept into the back of my mind as I worked on my article: barring an academic requirement, would I stay involved with Wikipedia? Or, more simply, how effective was Wikipedia’s community retention? At present, I found Wikipedia’s retention to be fairly ineffective. While I can appreciate why many choose to stay, going forward I do not believe I’ll continue to edit on any consistent basis.

In examining user retention in an online space, one key factor for many users is gratitude. Gratitude is a feeling of thankfulness and williness to show appreciation to others. Interestingly, Wikipedia is fairly active in their efforts to embed gratitude into the community. Beginning in June of 2011, an experiment was devised to make it easy for users to show gratitude to one another through the “WikiLove” program. According to their research, “being looked down on by more experienced editors” was a primary factor in users editing less often. To combat this, Wikilove centers on showing gratitude through a variety of means: from Barnstars (demonstrating a specific benefit to the site), to kittens, and finally, beverages. All are free, digital badges to be given between users as an expression of thanks. From my observations, there doesn't appear to be a clear distinction between different styles of WikiLove, making their application decidedly muddy. For example, when is giving a user a Kitten more appropriate than a Baklava? Perhaps if I were to spend more time as an active Wikipedian, these distinctions would be made apparent.

Interestingly, for our class, I was asked to give “WikiLove” to another user. On paper, approaching a user outside of our classroom environment to give a badge of WikiLove seemed fairly straightforward. However, in practice, I found myself immediately uncomfortable. As a relatively new user to the site, I felt “unqualified” to be giving a badge of WikiLove to a more experienced user. It felt as if I cheapened the gratitude by not truly understanding each Barnstar's significance. As a result, I gave what I deemed to be the most informal type of WikiLove, a charming kitten. Beyond the feeling of being “unqualified” to give out a medallion of WikiLove, I was also concerned this user would reach out and question my allotment of WikiLove. Thankfully, they did not.

As stated previously, another key factor in building a longterm relationship between an online community and its user base are “friendly interactions with existing community members soon after joining a community.” While I was initially sold on the notion of Wikipedia’s immense collaboration potential, I was disappointed to have no community interactions on the site. Only once was I approached by a fellow community member outside of the Online Communities course. The one time I was approached by a community member it was simply an ominous notification that my profile had been “patrolled.” Sadly, this was not the positive or friendly reinforcement that I was looking for as a new member. Without any sort of meaningful interactions with the broader Wikipedia community, I felt as as if my contributions were happening in a vacuum, and therefore, not particularly relevant to the community’s health as a whole.

Within the structure of the course, I did have a very positive interaction with a classmate. Fellow classmate, Isabellemcelentano provided two forms of interaction. First and foremost, she made a multitude of minor grammar changes to enhance the readabilty of the page I was working on. For example, as can be seen in this "diff," she made a number of small changes. While not immediately apparent to the casual reader, this second set of eyes undoubtedly helped the Borkum Island war crimes trial page. Additionally, this classmate edited the talk page to add kind words of encouragement. While it may not have been an exact WikiLove "Barnstar," I found it to be just as valuable. Any human connection on the site was a step in the right direction.

In reflecting upon my time as a Wikipedian, I found the editing tools to be obtuse and unintuitive. One might insist that these obtuse tools could be considered “entry barriers.” By the same logic, Kraut and Resnick state that “entry barriers for newcomers may cause those who join to be more committed to the group and contribute more to it.” In my experience, I found Wikipedia’s entry barrier to be in the form of a steep learning curve in understanding how to use the provided tools. Instead of finding these entry barriers as a way to enhance my participation, I found them to drive me in the other direction. At their core, the antiquated tools and site's clunky citation system were sources of constant frustration. Going forward, I do believe that Wikipedia will need to modernize its editing tools and community outreach to better attract and retain talent. Without these steps, they’re missing swaths of voices who are unable or unwilling to overcome the learning curve.

In sum, my time spent with Wikipedia’s online community was rocky. At the onset of this project, I was excited with the promise of being involved in one of humanity’s largest knowledge repositories. However, as time drew on and I became familiar with the community’s failures, poor implementation of gratitude, and outdated writing tools, I became frustrated. While Wikipedia will undoubtedly continue on for the foreseeable future, I would be remiss not express to my disappointment in what the community could be if it were to implement a modern online community design.