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My article: History of Man (song)

Wikipedia Reflection

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Introduction

“In the face of inevitable turnover, every online community must incorporate successive generations of newcomers to survive.” Something we focused on this semester was the idea of newcomers into an online community and how they assimilate, as well as how these communities welcome them. When reflecting back on my own experience joining the community of Wikipedia I found that being a newcomer can be a truly daunting experience, especially to such an established community like Wikipedia. This brings me back to the opening quote by Kraut. Online communities, such as Wikipedia, should push to create a welcoming space for newcomers, as doing so often benefits the community itself by persuading people to contribute, increasing motivation, and regulating vandals.

Personal Experience

In Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design, Kraut outlined three ways people learn the norms of a community: observing other people and the consequences of their behavior, seeing instructive generalizations or code of conduct, and behaving and receiving feedback. From my limited experience with Wikipedia I found that the site has incredibly detailed instructive pages, however for a newcomer it can be hard to know what pages are most important to read, or even where to find applicable pages. Furthermore, the dense amount of information provided on these pages can be very overwhelming, or at least I found this to be true in my own experience. Without former knowledge of the platform, newcomers aren’t able to take full advantage of these pages, and therefore they lose some of their effectiveness. If I were to make future recommendations to Wikipedia, based on my own newcomer experience, I would recommend expanding the WikiEdu dashboard to all newcomers. As I previously mentioned, although easily accessible, there is a lot of information for a newcomer to digest. I found it incredibly helpful to take these courses and learn the basics before getting started, and believe this is something that could help other newcomers. I do not think there needs to be a course on every Wikipedia norm, but it could be beneficial for newcomers to have these interactive lessons on the important basic concepts as they begin their Wikipedia journey.

A big part of my own experience with learning the norms on Wikipedia was through trial and error, or as Kraut puts it, “behaving and receiving feedback.” As I mentioned before, it is hard to fully grasp all the ins-and-outs of Wikipedia as a newcomer. Therefore, when it came time for me to start making my own contributions to Wikipedia I didn’t feel fully confident. However, I personally feel I learned more through doing. Not many edits were made to my page, and the ones that were mostly had to do with formatting, but I still found this is where I learned the most. There are a number of nuances on Wikipedia that may not be obvious to newcomers, such as myself, and being given the space to learn by doing was something I found incredibly helpful. On the flip side these nuances were something I struggled with as well. In any community, including Wikipedia, there are often a number of unwritten rules and norms that aren’t always obvious to those just joining. During my experience, I had a hard time understanding the Wikipedian language. There are a lot of abbreviations used, as well as other lingo, that didn’t come naturally to me. At times, I could see edits to my work were made but it wasn’t always clear to me why, and often times that had to do with the shorthand that Wikipedia has developed. Although it is perfectly natural that a community would form its own language of sorts, it can be incredibly isolating to newcomers who have only just put their foot in the door.

Overall, I would say I had a pretty neutral experience with Wikipedia that skewed slightly more negative. Personally, I found the experience incredibly overwhelming and that made me scared to fully throw myself into the community. I was too worried about messing up or breaking a rule I was unaware of that it prevented me from truly embracing the experience. While, I know a community exists within Wikipedia, it always felt like I was on the outside looking in or that I was intruding where I didn’t belong. I don’t think that the fault of this lies solely with Wikipedia however. This is not necessarily a community I would join outside of this class setting, as it doesn’t align much with my personality, and therefore I think I struggled finding motivation to fully give it a chance. As we learned from Alfie Kohn, extrinsic motivation can often backfire and be harmful in the long run. Kohn provides the example of Greg Prestegord. Greg loves baseball and when the library set up a summer reading program where Greg could earn prizes, such as baseball cards, by reading books he began checking out library books and reading them. While the outcome of this reward system seems positive, as Greg's mother puts it "at least he's reading now" there are long term effects not being accounted for. By buying this behavior (aka extrinsically motivating) now it solves the problem only for a short period of time, but as Kohn points out, after the baseball cards run out the Greg, and the other children, are not only unlikely to continue reading, but are even less likely then they were before the rewards program. As for me, my extrinsic motivation wasn’t in the form of baseball cards, but rather a grade. While I gained a great understanding for what goes on behind the scenes of the Wikipedia I had only ever used for research purposes, I didn’t necessarily gain an appetite to want to continue contributing to the platform.

Newcomers and Community

Another takeaway I got from this experience was the importance of being welcoming to newcomers. “Newcomers can be a source of innovation, new ideas, and work procedures or other resources that the group needs.” Creating a friendly environment doesn’t only benefit the newcomers, but can also be a great asset to Wikipedia. First, it can help in persuading people to contribute to the platform, as well as increase motivation in newcomers. Wikipedia exists because of the contributions people have made. Therefore, in order for it to continue existing, it not only needs people to continue to contribute, needs new people to want to join the community as well. "When newcomers have friendly interactions with existing community members soon after joining a community, they are more likely to stay longer and contribute more." Creating an environment newcomers want to be a part of by making their initial interactions welcoming, encourages them to want to stick around and be a contributing member of the community. Furthermore, “people are more likely to comply with requests the more they like the requester.” If the environment created is welcoming and newcomers enjoy being there, Wikipedia can ask them for more and they will be more willing to comply. One way Wikipedia could make this a reality is recruiting established Wikipedia users to serve as orientation guides for newcomers. Having these welcome buddies and creating these early relationships will not only help newcomers gain a clearer understanding of the Wikipedia community, but make it so they want to be a greater part of it. This allows Wikipedia to grow as a community, or even just maintain its current state.

Newcomers can also be a risk for a community such as Wikipedia, as they are likely to make mistakes and potentially interfere with the community norms, or be vandals to the community. However, by being friendly with newcomers and helping them when mistakes are made has proved to be a more beneficial method for communities. A study, by Catherine Cramton, found that in successful groups people tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, whereas the use of escalated hostility was typically seen in less successful groups. Essentially Cramton found that “ a cultural norm of assuming good faith can mitigate negative attributions.” In other words, being welcoming to those just joining Wikipedia will have more positive effects on the community than punishing newcomers for simple mistakes. Creating room for mistakes to happen, and politely working with newcomers to help them understand the correct way of doing things, will encourage them to do things right in the future. It will also create a space where these newcomers feel comfortable and willing to participate, which only grows and adds to the community as a whole. On the flip side, taking a negative approach could lead to these newcomers pushing against the status quo, or becoming 'vandals', and creating chaos within the community.

Conclusion

Throughout this process, and the discussions we had in class, I learned a lot about what goes into a successful online community. Getting to experience what it was like to be a newcomer in one of these established communities, Wikipedia, allowed me to gain a new perspective. My main takeaway from this experience has been that fostering a welcoming environment for newcomers, whether that is through expanding the WikiEdu dashboard, creating a buddy system, or just offering friendly assistance, will only enhance one’s community and mitigate potential risks associated with newcomers. Online communities need newcomers in order to ensure their longevity, and therefore it is essential that they create a space that these newcomers want to join.

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