I’ve been using Wikipedia pretty much my whole academic life, its been a site that has given me knowledge beyond what I can comprehend. I think a lot of us see Wikipedia as a site that kind of maintains itself, we have always known that it was possible to edit its content, but never got the full concept of that. Being able to be an active member of the Wikipedia community, through this six – weeks has really opened up my eyes to the site as a whole, and how important online communities can be.
I made an article for personnel groupings in American Football, and essentially what that means and how that works. It was a great experience, learning how to edit Wikipedia but also how to interact with the community on Wikipedia to make my article better. Throughout my experience it was a constant learning process and I was always trying to get a grasp on Wikipedia norms and standards. It was tough mainly because I knew that I would be putting out a live article for everyone to read, so I was very nervous to put out an article that a lot of people would think was unnecessary or uninformative. I struggled with that throughout the editing process, and mainly being able to apply user feedback and give it to my other classmates. I had trouble with being able to understand the user talk pages as well as the article talk pages. The main thing that I learned throughout this process of editing Wikipedia articles, was understanding Wikipedia’s user base and that there is a user to edit article’s for almost anything. It was definitely a nerve wracking experience at first, but I definitely warmed up to it and the Wikipedia community as well as my classmates were very helpful throughout.
The concepts of what makes an online community what it is, and effectively how its able to sustain is a concept I was able to grasp more thoroughly through this process. The one thing that sticks out to me is what it means to be a newcomer in a community that is so well established, and has been here many years. In the book “Building Successful Online Communities” by Resnick and Kraut they talk about how joining a community later can be difficult, because there are more rules involved as well as there being an oligarchy. For me joining Wikipedia a lot of these things crossed my mind, and the main question I asked myself was will I be a contributing member that is actually putting forth important content. The main thing I slowly took away throughout this process, is that a lot of these things are natural to think about and there is no way around them really. But, being able to understand the circumstances that I’m in as a newcomer to an already established community really allowed me to give it my all and hope that I was able to get positive feedback to make me a better contributing member.
Throughout my time editing and creating an article on Wikipedia I have learned a lot of important things about online communities. The number one most important being that other community members only wish to see it succeed, and provide content to others that is worth there time. This came to me as I got messages from other users as well as getting my article edited by others to make it a better article. A lot of the times the biggest thing that crosses you mind when writing something for the masses is thinking is it good enough. Through Wikipedia I was able to get contributions to my article from like-minded people who only wish to see it become a better article, and effectively give content to others that they can rely on and learn from.
The way Wikipedia is sustained and maintained makes it an online community that is always changing and because of that usually doesn’t need to make any one big change. I think that Wikipedia offers a lot for newcomers and veterans alike, the most important being that it seeks to provide a community where its users can interact to make the content and the service they are doing better. Overall, my experience with Wikipedia over these past couple of weeks has been one of great discovery and joy. Discovery in the sense of learning something new, and joy in being able to create something that everyone in the world has the ability to learn from and enjoy.
