User:YouDubStudent/Report

In this essay I will be discussing my experiences with contributing to Wikipedia for my Communication 481 class.  Over the course of this essay I will address what I found to be a positive experience as well as aspects that I found to be negative. I will also offer my opinion on what could be improved.

I will start with the positive aspects of my Wikipedia experience. Wikipedia does a very good job on showing other peoples’ contributions to the community. In turn, I found this motivating. If so many people use their free time to contribute to Wikipedia, I definitely can try to do my best when it is my project for my class. This has a direct connection to the design claim 12 in Chapter 2 of Building Successful Online Communities that states that people are more likely to comply with a task if other people’s contribution are visible. I think Wikipedia succeeds in showing other peoples’ contributions and using it as a motivator of sorts. Another aspect that I found very useful in this project was the Sandbox and the tools in there. In Chapter 4 of Building Successful Online Communities Design Claim 5 it states that reversion tools limit  the damage disruptors can cause in the community.  As a newcomer to the community, I was a disrupter even though it was all out of goodwill. I did not not know the norms of the community and without the sandbox and the reversion tools made available to me, I would have probably accidentally disrupted the community. By utilizing the Sandbox, I was introduced and practiced the norms until I was competent enough to participate in the real community by making my article live.

My Wikipedia experience was not without negative experiences. One of these negative experiences really affected my start in this community. I use an Ipad Pro for my classes. However for some reason, Wikipedia and WikiEdu had problems on the mobile platform.  When opening up a page, information that was supposed to appear in the page for me to work on would not appear. This happened many times when making my sandbox, peer reviewing other articles, and making a bibliography. When starting out, I was not made aware of this issue so I did not know that there were supposed to be forms in the page I created.  I was left to do most of the work starting from a blank page. It wasn’t till after I compared my work with that of a classmate that I realized that the information that was supposed to have been transferred when making the page did not transfer. Even after bringing this issue up, nothing was done to resolve this issue. This was an annoying part of my entrance to this community. It confused me and made my first couple of experiences in this community more complicated and stressful than necessary.  

This brings me to what I think can be improved in the Wikipedia community. First thing I think that could be improved relates to my issues stated in the previous paragraph. Many people use tablets and phones for internet activity, so this problem could affect a large amount of people. A simple warning could be used to inform mobile users that they will have to find and copy/past forms manually. This would save many users from starting off their experience in the community confused and frustrated.  The start of a user's experience is very important in determining if that user will continue to contribute. To ensure a good first experience, bugs should be fixed or at least new users should be made aware of the bugs in order to work around them efficiently. I think another part of this community that could be improved is the motivation. For me my motivation to complete my article was extrinsic because it was a part of my class. I was motivated to do my best because the outcome determined my grade. However for people who are not a part of this class, the motivation switches to more of an intrinsic motivation. As contributors are becoming fewers, but consumption is still growing there seems to be a need to motivate more contributors.  This could be achieved in a variety of ways. One would be to implement more extrinsic rewards to motivate people to become and stay active. This could be a similar system to Barnstars, but on a larger scale. People would be rewarded for writing/improving articles,editing, and other upkeeping tasks. These accomplishments would be shown on the users page. The down side of this however is that this will increase overall activity, but the “competition” aspect might discourage some users. This downside can be countered by adding more intrinsic reward and a normative motivation on top. By combining multiple motivators a larger scale of people will be motivated. These motivations could be messages sent to users who have not been active or as active as they used to be. The messages could start by saying that they hope everything is alright with the user. The messages would then list the problems within the community then offer suggestions that the user could help with. The user might feel compelled to come back to contribute and feel good that they helped the community. This is just one example that might be used to motivate a larger group of people to contribute to the Wikipedia community.

Overall my experience in the Wikipedia community was a positive one. I learned how to contribute and make articles on Wikipedia. I was introduced to a huge online community that previously I would only lurk and not contribute to. Now that I have contributed, I understand the importance of Wikipedia and that it is more trustworthy than I had previously believed. I don’t know if I will continue to write articles in Wikipedia in the future, but it is nice knowing that I know how. If I do see a problem in the future I can easily fix it now.

References

Kraut, Robert E., et al. Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. The MIT Press, 2016.