User:Madisonrockw18/Report

Analyzing Wikipedia

The user experience on Wikipedia is structured to help new users get started, inspire existing users to continue to make edits, and maintain a high standard of work. The routines that are in place work well, and have made Wikipedia what it is today, however improvements can be made to make the experience more exceptional. By building off of current practices, I recommend Wikipedia implement advertising, progressive access control, and profile edits, in order to improve the newcomer experience and have the ability to attract and retain more members.

Even with extensive training and tutorials that were provided by Wikipedia for me as a new user, I still found myself a little apprehensive about becoming a contributor. My primary suggestions for the Wikipedia community revolve around adjusting this newcomer experience and making it more seamless. The goal with my following suggestions is to turn people who read Wikipedia into people who contribute to Wikipedia.

My first suggestion for this would be to integrate some light advertising into the articles. From the perspective of a Wikipedia viewer, it is not as easy as it should be to see the ways that you can contribute. I would suggest incorporating a link such as “learn how to contribute to this topic on Wikipedia”, within each article. This link would then lead to more information on becoming a Wikipedian, and the benefits of doing so. Reading into this imagined link on ways to contribute would attract people who are serious about becoming part of the community, and could be a great way to acquire high-quality editors. As discussed by Dr. Hill, for people who are casually viewing a community, “showing attractive features” can be an effective strategy for recruitment.

Another way to expose people to the editing side of Wikipedia would be to have a pop-up window saying something like “Want to contribute to your community and improve this article?”, as the first thing a reader sees when they begin reading a new article. Prior to my online communities class, the path to becoming a Wikipedia editor was unclear. An advertisement like this would increase awareness about being a Wikipedian, and would likely attract some of the right people to the community. Raising awareness through on-site advertising and clearly showing prospective users what joining the community entails, supports the theory of self-selection which has shown to have positive impacts on online communities. This would help Wikipedia bring in effective contributors and keep non-committed low-quality efforts away from the site.

Once people have joined the community, the next challenge is getting them to start and continue making contributions. One challenge I ran into while working with Wikipedia was finding an article to contribute to. Even with my topics of interest in mind, it was still a challenge finding an article that I was excited to work on. The number of articles on Wikipedia can be overwhelming, so one suggestion I have about improving the experience for Wikipedians is to have a better system for sorting through and selecting articles. Conducting a survey of the Wikipedian’s interests could be a great way to do this and activate normative commitment, the type of commitment that describes when users feel like they are “contributing to the grater good”. Many Wikipedians say that they contribute because they want to “popularize topics that they care about”. Connecting users to articles that they care about would be a great way to retain exceptional editors.

As the newcomer experience progresses, the new user is introduced to the sandbox, a place for newcomers to feel safe to practice their new skills. The sandbox certainly helped me become more confident and fluent in my Wikipedia editing skills. However, upon reflection of this practice, it is notable that new users are not making any immediate, tangible contributions to Wikipedia when working in the sandbox. While it is important for people to practice and learn before editing live articles, I believe there is still room for newcomers to experience “legitimate peripheral participation”. Legitimate peripheral participation is a term used to describe the work of someone who is learning on the job or “becoming more experienced members through small but productive actions in the community”.

There are several things that Wikipedia can have new users do that would qualify as legitimate peripheral participation. One example would be having newcomers leave productive comments on existing articles. This would help with talk page fluency and would also allow newcomers to start thinking critically about what an effective Wikipedia page should look like. It would also help Wikipedians directly by making giving them suggestions for improving articles. Wikipedia could also have newcomers be assigned articles to fact check or to review sourcing for. This would be another way for newcomers to practice by making legitimate contributions.

The final thing I would suggest for improving Wikipedia would be to edit the “your impact” tab under a user’s profile. I like that this feature exists, however I think it is a bit bland and could be adjusted so that the statistics are more readable and clear. It is important on a volunteer site like Wikipedia that we keep people coming back. Emphasizing the impact of Wikipedians would be a great way to allow users to conceptualize their contributions and increase normative commitment on the site.

The goal for maintaining a highly successful online community is to recruit high-quality contributors and to get them to remain active participants. To do this, we must consider reasons why people join and why they stay.To ensure that Wikipedia remains the relevant community that it is, we must raise awareness to attract the right people, provide better ways for newcomers to actively participate, and find ways to inspire normative commitment among users. By making adjustments to the newcomer experience, and encouraging a more smooth contribution process, we can ensure that Wikipedia remains a useful online community for all who come across it.