User:LinearBicycle/Report

Reflection Essay

I learned a lot of things from my experience in Wikipedia. I grew up from an “outsider” who know nothing about this community to an editor who can publish articles and make changes in Wikipedia. To be honest, I never thought I am able to do that when I first heard about the assignment. And I also didn’t believe that my professor is serious about assigning this assignment. However, I learned how to participate in an academic online community like Wikipedia. This is different from all the community I joined before, people contribute to this community by publishing articles about a certain keyword to help people who might search for these keywords. It is like an encyclopedia, and Wikipedia has its own rules and norms which are very unique about the articles you write and reference you use.

However, after participating in this community for almost a month. I found that some changes could make Wikipedia become a better community. Firstly, I think Wikipedia should enforce the rules and strengthen the supervision of new users. From what I observed, Wikipedia has low barriers to contribution. People who want to participate in this community could simply apply for an account, then they could be a contributor and make changes in Wikipedia. This might be a good thing to attract more contributors to this community, but it also increases the risk that people abuse their rights to do harmful things in the community. For example, from the classes, we saw the example of the North Face, and some people maliciously changing the content in Wikipedia articles just for fun. Also, many people are not malicious, but just unfamiliar with the rules. They could still disturb the community by publishing things that violated the rules.

I have this kind of experience during the Wikipedia assignment. When I was writing my first draft, I accidentally moved my article to live. It is an incomplete article and shouldn’t show up on Wikipedia at that time. I didn’t intend to do that, but what I did is disturb the community. I did training on the Wiki Dashboard and a professor is teaching me how to do it. Nevertheless, I still made a mistake. Imagine how easily people will make mistakes in this community when they have no Wiki Dashboard to do training and no professor to help them.    Thus, I suggest that Wikipedia could raise the cost of entry by giving formal and sequential training. And new users who joined within two weeks should be censored by Wikipedia before making to live. This could connect to our course concept "Costly barriers—in time or money— mean that only more motivated individuals will join”. The newcomers have to spend time finishing the formal training before they could do any changes in Wikipedia. Although raise the entry cost may cause reduce in new users. This helps to screen the user who is more motivated to join this community and keep malicious users from easily joining the community. Moreover, once people finish the training, they will be more likely to continue to participate and active in this community because they already put the effort into it (sunk cost). Thus, this method not only decreases the risk for malicious users but also helps to screen the right users and encourage people to continue to participate in the future. And the new user censor could make sure people didn't accidentally do the wrong things like me.

Another problem I encountered when I started learning Wikipedia is that I found it is hard for people to bond with other members of this community. If you want to talk to someone on Wikipedia, you have to leave messages on their user page. It is public and others could also see it.  As a new user, I felt very awkward doing that and I was also afraid of asking the wrong question. Moreover, I think it is a very inconvenient way to leave a message to each other and this would keep people from bonding with each other.

Therefore, I hope Wikipedia could change the way people could interact with each other by adding a chat-box for people to send private messages and a friend list for people to bond with each other. Now, people who participate in Wikipedia seems more normative and identity-based. And it is doing great so far. However, I think letting people bond with each other would increase their commitment and make people feel more belonging in a community. For example, the article I was editing is Da Hong Pao. And I thought the previous contributor who edited Da Hong Pao may have the same interest as me, and I could learn from them or talk with them. After I found out the only way I could talk to them is to leave them a message on their user page, I gave up this idea. As a result, I hope there could be a friend list where I could add friends and chat with them in the community. I do believe this feature could facilitate people within this community and attract more young users.

The last thing I think Wikipedia could change is that it could add more functions that keep pace with the times. For example, google docs are widely used by people. Wikipedia could add a feature called “shared sandbox”. People could invite other users or their friends to join and edit an article together by using this function. It is just like google docs, every invited party could make changes on the shared Wikipedia sandbox. People could also refer to their friends and invite them to register in Wikipedia and revise the article together. This could motivate people to participate and contribute to the community, and the content quality may increase since it is edited by multiple people. Editing an article is not a very interesting thing for me, but if I could edit it with my friends, both parties would feel a sense of accomplishment. Moreover, the referral friends' function is also good advertising for Wikipedia, and it is more likely to attract the right users.

In conclusion, I think Wikipedia is a very unique community. Thus, I believe people who want to participate in it should learn the rules very well. My suggestions are based on my own experience and I hope Wikipedia could add more features that could facilitate people to have friendship bonds in the community.