User:GrandpaFly

A grandpa fly is a name created by this Wikipedian's mother for uncharacteristically large houseflies who fly at relatively slower speeds than most of their kin. Coincidentally, this Wikipedian is described by friends and enemies alike as exhibiting grandpa-like behaviors, but neither would describe him as fly (although he begs to differ).

Wikipedia Reflection Assignment: Introduction

Name four million things you know about. Just try it; I’ll give you a few minutes. Ready? If you are like most people, your small, human mind probably named fifteen things within reach of you before getting tired and wanting to watch Netflix. Wikipedia has over four and a half million articles created, edited, and contested by users—and that is just the English Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s articles range from anything between each individual episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to elementary stuff like asymptotic safety in quantum gravity. In many ways, Wikipedia captures the essence of what the internet represents: a collaborative effort that supersedes physical and cultural boundaries to collect knowledge from all over the world and makes it accessible to everyone. My class, Online Communities, started with a smaller-scope goal to create and edit Wikipedia articles about people, places, and events in Boston, Massachusetts’ history. Throughout my assignment, I found Wikipedia’s training system, sandbox, and community to provide only the most basic support, but they do not take advantage of a greater potential for the larger Wikipedia society.

Wikipedia Reflection

Training

When beginning my experience with Wikipedia, I was assigned to complete the Wikipedia training for students, which was incredibly helpful as an introduction to the Wikipedia community. The student training is more extensive than the generalized training for newcomers and led me through a step-by-step process, familiarizing me with Wikipedia’s policies and how to edit articles. The first thing I learned was Wikipedia’s Five Pillars, each of which Wikipedia explains in detail and provides links to its own articles for further understanding. Some of the more salient points of the training are supplemented by video tutorials that clarified Wikipedia’s features and cultural values. The lessons on editing utilized sandboxes for me to practice formatting. Wikipedia’s use of sandboxes in the training help to “both speed up the learning process for newcomers and reduce the harm to the community”. The sandboxes were a relief for me to use before working in the main space, because had I created an article or attempted to edit one, I would have been confused with the wikicode and self-conscious of my formatting—or in wikispeak, I would not have been ‘’bold’’. The training took about an hour and a half for me to complete and feel confident with my skills.

Overall, the student training was an important introduction to Wikipedia’s community and culture. But at the end of my first experience using Wikipedia, it only makes me wonder: why do not all newcomers go through this process? After all, Kraut et al. cite that 60% of Wikipedia users virtually disappear within 24 hours of making their first edit. Were all newcomers to complete a training, it could limit trolling accounts, create less friction for newcomers entering the community, and generate greater loyalty to the Wikipedia community among users who complete it.

My training took about an hour and a half; by requiring new users to complete such a lengthy and thorough training, Wikipedia would discourage all but the most determined trolls. Trolls will usually not care to waste such time and effort to cause havoc, which in turn would reduce the time and effort Wikipedians spend to reverse the changes trolls make to articles, thus giving them more time to spend contributing to articles. Similarly, newcomers who are obliged to learn Wikipedia’s Five Pillars may be more inclined to adhere to them, thus reducing the time committed to settling disputes and re-directing undesirable behavior. The Five Pillars are Wikipedia’s guiding principles for etiquette, and if everyone knew them, they would “increase the ability for community members to know the norms, especially when it is less clear what others think is acceptable”. Learning Wikipedia’s editing basics would also help to reduce the amount of work other Wikipedians must spend maintaining articles. Such actions are the result of user loyalty on the user’s part, but Wikipedia can create stronger identity-based commitment—identification with a large, shared group—and cognitive dissonance—rationalizing a difficult initiation process to convince oneself of loyalty to a group—if it required all users to complete a training. Researchers Elliot Arson and Judson Mills found in a study that the more rigorous the induction process for a group, the more loyal the participants felt toward the group. Wikipedia’s trainings can be used to socialize new members into its culture so that they become “more committed to the community, learn how to behave in it, and contribute more”. In order to do that, Wikipedia must require all newcomers to go through a training, or at the very least, make it more easily to find. Searching for the training again was incredibly difficult for me. I ended up having to click through various tabs that did not give me any specific direction. For users new to contributing to Wikipedia, many will be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of articles through which they must click and the difficulty to find any sort of training while seeking out guidance. Kraut et al. explain that by decreasing the navigation cost (the amount of searching required to reach the desired destination), an online community—in this case, Wikipedia—will increase the net benefit of its training for the whole community. Whether forced or optional (with easier access), it is in Wikipedia’s best interest for newcomers to go through its training.

Writing and Editing

When I finally began writing my article, the sandbox was incredibly useful for me to draft an entire article without worry of making mistakes in an “official” space or of others interfering with my work before its completion. Its design could be improved, however. For newcomers creating an article, the gaping blank space can be intimidating. I was almost at a complete loss for where to start my article. What sort of information is required, I wondered. How do I start a description of my topic? What does a Wikipedia article even look like? I ended up searching random Wikipedia articles on different people—actors and actresses, Presidents, writers. Eventually, I developed a concept of the headings and subheadings I wanted to use. Wikipedia could streamline this process by allowing users to choose from templates people, places, events, and other topics when creating articles. Newcomers to Wikipedia might be more bold to create their own articles if more direction was provided with templates, and once they become seasoned, they may format articles how they see best.

Citing references became a painful process as well. Wikipedia does have a training on different ways to code citations, but none of them are flawless. Writing citations directly into an article can be very complicated and make a visual mess of the rest of the raw article when writing or editing it. Wikipedia’s Cite gadget in the editing toolbar is a slightly easier option, but suffers from bugginess. By the time I (thought I) finished my reference list using the Cite gadget, my reference list was cluttered because my citations were not in order (they must be written into the article in order) and there were formatting issues that I could not figure out how to change. Wikipedia could benefit from an auto-citation program like the one on EasyBib.com that can arrange all the information for the users and condense the citations in the wikicode so that sources can be easily cited more than once and not interrupt the flow of the text. Wikipedians would be able to navigate more easily within copyright restrictions when adding information. The Cite gadget is the most effective out of all citation options on Wikipedia to properly credit sources, but it lacks the refinement to easily add citations into the text and adhere to formatting, which would improve its utility.

Community

My final task for my class Wikipedia assignment was to give wikilove to a user outside of my class. I chose to give wikilove to user:Darylgolden because he or she was the first Wikipedian outside of my class to edit my article and therefore contribute to its success and my integration into the Wikipedia community. Wikilove is a proper form of extrinsic reward, or tangible gain, because it is given at random by other users’ choice and grants no special status or privilege, thus reducing any reason or motivation to game the system. It provides fleeting moments of personal interaction in a sea of users and information, and amidst arguments in talk spaces resulting from content clashes, it gives users the chance to make wikilove, not war.

However, beyond users’ edits to my article and sharing wikilove, I experienced a disappointing lack of interaction with Wikipedia’s community. This could be the result of my student banner, or Wikipedia’s general culture may be less personal than other sites. My class required me to put a student banner at the top of my article to let others know that I am in a class learning Wikipedia. Veteran users who came across the article when the banner was still displayed may have moved on to another article upon seeing that it was created for a class because it served as a symbol to Wikipedia veterans that corrections to the articles in the class would be made by others in the class. By identifying myself to a smaller group, I isolated myself from the greater community.

Wikipedia’s culture, though, does not seem to be a primarily bonds-based community, or a community that operates through the personal interactions between its users. Wikipedia’s goal is to create the world’s largest source of information. If friendships are built in the process, the community has small designs implemented to support them, but friendships are secondary to its goal. Wikipedia’s community portal directs users to links mostly for help with various aspects of Wikipedia’s culture. Kraut et al. suggest that providing spaces for “[o]ff-topic communication reduces identity-based commitment and increases bonds-based commitment”. There is a distinct lack of opportunities for purely social interaction in Wikipedia. Offering a space for users to interact could connect users from all over the world and strengthen those of Wikipedia’s Five Pillars that encourage respect and understanding.

Conclusion

Wikipedia was conceived in the early stages of the internet’s evolution and has since developed (and continues to develop) to more efficiently serve its mission and the people who contribute to it. Though I made only small contributions to one of the most ambitious projects in human history, I had fun while doing it. So would I do it again? Definitely.