User:XingranLiu/reflection

Reflection

My previous understandings of Wikipedia were comprehensive but unreliable since first, it's an open encyclopedia that claims everyone can be an editor, which seems less rigorous to me; second, almost all teachers prohibit students from citing sources from Wikipedia. Thus, it’s very surprising for me to find out that Wikipedians treat Wikipedia articles seriously, including conflicts over detailed information and even a single word choice. Through the last three-month personal experience, my understandings of Wikipedia has changed. I now perceive Wikipedia as a precise encyclopedia which has strict rules on public contents and Wikipedians as a group of people who know their enthusiasms and bring the enthusiasm into force voluntarily.

Unlike other online social media communities that trying to recruit as many users as possible, Wikipedia is a special community that, at least I think, more tend to recruit qualified users who can make real contributions to the community. Firstly, Wikipedia is such a well-known website now so it doesn’t need to put too much effort into advertising or enhancing its prestige. Since the user base of Wikipedia is large, I believe the main problems that Wikipedia faces are the selection of newcomers and the regulation of newcomers. In Building Successful Online Communities, Kraut and Resnick say that “ensuring that new recruits match the style and values of an online community will lead them to stay longer and be more satisfied with their membership, and it will lead to more benefits for the group as a whole and for existing members”. Users have different reasons to join Wikipedia in the first place but those who choose to stay after a period of time must agree with the core values of Wikipedia and enjoy interacting with the community. For example, students in Dr. Reagle’s Online Community course joined because of class work. When the course ends, some students may keep contributing to Wikipedia and become real Wikipedians while some may return back to a normal reader like millions of others on the Internet. Personally, I’m not going to stay in Wikipedia because my “style and values” do not match with Wikipedia, so Wikipedia can avoid any potential violations and breaches I might practice as a newcomer.  

Thus, the core value of a community should be well-expressed to potential users. Kraut and Resnick raise a design claim that “providing potential new members with an accurate and complete picture of what the members’ experience will be once they join increases the fit of those who join”. Wikipedia has a clear goal for newcomers, that is to contribute meaningful and notable information to the world, which automatically filters some unsuitable newcomers. In addition, Wikipedia also does a good job of being friendly to newcomers. All of us received welcome messages from several specific experienced editors which gave me additional confidence to exercise actively in Wikipedia, and this matches another Kraut and Resnick’s design claim, “assigning the responsibilities of having friendly interactions with newcomers to particular community members increases the frequency of these interactions”.

After recruiting newcomers, online communities are now facing the problems of moderating the community. In James Grimmelmann’s article The Virtues of Moderation, he defines moderation as “the governance mechanisms that structure participation in a community to facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse”. This definition indicates two objectives of moderation: “facilitate cooperation” and “prevent abuse”. In order to achieve the goals, Grimmelmann introduces four verbs to manage the moderation process: exclusion, pricing, organization, and norm-setting. For example, in terms of Wikipedia, users can be totally excluded from the entire Wikipedia community or from specific topics and articles. I was engaging more frequently with “organization”, where “moderators reshape the flow of content from authors to readers”. Differently, I think the organization process in Wikipedia is not only operating by moderators (senior editors) but also other Wikipedians. My article has been reviewed by peers, a professor, and a Wikipedia editor. Wing reviewed my article before it was totally done, so she left a message on my talk page to give suggestions for my unfinished section. Michelle Liu rephrased some of my sentences and also provided ideas about my “Responses” section Special:Diff/889465243. Vishare gave some advice on being more detailed as a special event so that readers can fully understand the situation without doing additional research. Professor Reagle helped me with formatting the "Timeline" section since my old version was Special:Permalink/90046864 not concise and clear enough to read, and for general content, he corrected wordings and marked awkward places Special:Diff/890058440. Lastly, editor Shalor and Elysia made their comments from their perspectives of views on the general position of my article: if it should be merged into Meng Wanzhou's article and the citation and references formats.

In Grimmelmann’s words, “Wikipedia’s system of moderation is sophisticated and intricate, but its two basic commitments have remained distributed organization and strong social norms”. First, Wikipedia aims to establish a distributed organization, and I can see this commitment through the active discussions and large scale of contributions from different authors on one single article. Second, Wikipedia aims to create positive social norms, which from my experience, the most impressive thing for me is that although the process of editing Wikipedia articles is so time-consuming and exhausting, Wikipedians are consistently working on articles and discussing topics because they have the enthusiasm of creating neutral facts to the world.

As Grimmelmann’s definition of moderation mentions, moderation is part of “governance mechanisms”, thus the governance of the community establishes general rules and principles of how the community should work and how members should behave. The governance of the community should achieve consensus at some point, but it’s always hard to reach consensus in an online community with so many anonymous users with various culture, education, etc. In the case of Wikipedia, I saw many notifications on top of articles which tell readers the potential conflict on this article or topic so that readers are aware of all perspectives, and also the Arbitration Committee which consists of experienced Wikipedians. As Joseph Reagle writes in The Challenges of Consensus, despite the effectiveness of consensus in the decision-making  process, it’s tough to practice in real life, and “the history and challenges of online consensus, particularly this question of who decides when one has it”. I can speak of this myself on the task of choosing a topic. Although Wikipedia has plenty of information on how to determine a notable topic, there are many discussions about controversial topics, and it seems that both sides have sufficient support from the “consensus” on the notability of Wikipedia articles.

Moreover, banning is another essential part of online community governance. Brendan Maher’s article Can a video game company tame toxic behaviour? Introduces Riot’s, the developing company of League of Legends, method of banning users. Basically, Riot developed a program called “Tribunal” that allow players to make comments on each other’s performances, and “volunteers review chat logs from a player who has been reported for bad behaviour, and then vote on whether the offender deserves punishment.” This peer-evaluation mode can save extra labor force for the community and more importantly, Tribunal can provide detailed reports and grounded evidence to banned users so that they know exactly what did they do wrong and prevent it from happening in the future. Generally speaking, Wikipedia designs its banning rules based on its own characteristics which can definitely increase the degree of effectiveness, and there are also specific pages for users to see the banned cases and discuss. Since I’m still a newcomer, I didn’t engage with the banning process myself but I know that Wikipedia has detailed rules for banning and different types of bans (such as article ban, interaction ban, topic ban, etc.).

Back to the beginning, Wikipedia surprised me a lot, especially the balance it keeps between openness and regulation. As I mentioned, since everyone can edit Wiki articles, I assumed it would lower the credibility of the information, but Wikipedia actually put a lot of effort into checking the reliability of sources. For me, it doesn’t only indicate that Wikipedia is a reliable source, but more about social responsibility as a worldwide free encyclopedia that everyone can see and many people’s first source of new information. In Maher’s article,  the leader of Riot’s research team Lin said, “we're not an edutainment company. We're a games company first, but we're aware of how it could be used to educate”. I believe online communities with such a large user base like League of Legends and Wikipedia should put social responsibility into their considerations so as to improve the atmosphere of the online community as a whole.

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User:XingranLiu/sandbox